Self-Hosted Appstravaganza!

The last few weeks have been great for personal productivity. Self-hosting has grown from a hobby into a full-blown passion, and from that, I’ve developed a handful of personal web app solutions. I’ll walk through a few of them below.

Tempo.

You may have seen this one before, but it’s gone through so many iterations that it’s practically unrecognizable now. It’s cleaner, more professional, and loaded with new user enhancements - including a customizable workout feature. If you want to do a specific set of exercises, just select them and hit start.

The app counts down, gives audio cues when the next set is coming up, and flashes the screen as a visual indicator. This solved a treadmill problem I had - when I’m zoned out or watching Mike Matei on Twitch, I often miss when my timer ends.

It’s free to use with the link above. I’m not going to track you. If you find it useful, let me know.

Prepped.

If you scroll down a bit on this page to an earlier post, you’ll find “Prepped,” my weekly meal-prep guide. It looks the same as before, but there have been a lot of backend improvements - which I’ll cover here in a moment.

Ping.

Then there’s Ping, my Slack replacement for personal updates. I wrote a ton of bots that perform various status checks and report back here (and to my self-hosted push server). My phone gets notifications without depending on Google’s invasive Play framework. That’s huge for privacy and reliability. This dashboard keeps me informed of most everything I’m interested in.

Echo.

My tt-rss Docker container recently died, leaving me with a news-shaped hole in my life. I tried to repair it, but it refused to spin back up. After testing every RSS reader listed on Awesome-Selfhosted, I found each had its own flaws - too resource-heavy, clunky UI, or unnecessary features. So, like always, I built my own. I knew exactly what I wanted and cut out the fluff.

It feels so free to control your own tools. It’s easy to tweak features and address bugs since we own the source. My reader is simple but solid, and I’ve been collecting ideas for future sprints in my task manager - which brings me to…

Focus.

Focus keeps improving because I can’t leave it alone. There’s always some detail to polish or logic to refine. It’s nearly ready to replace TickTick. I finished building the date-parsing system and added several small quality-of-life updates. Since it’s my app, I can make it look and behave exactly how I want. No user complaints or unwanted features here. If something needs changing, I just modify it myself.

One of TickTick’s biggest flaws is its weak API. I fought too long trying to get data out of it. Focus fixes that by having its own API, which lets all my other apps communicate directly with it.

HoneyDo

Take HoneyDo, for example - my wife’s new task-request app. It gives her a quick, easy way to send requests to me that won’t get lost or forgotten. When she adds a request, it appears instantly in Ping, triggers a push notification on my phone, and creates a new task in Focus through the API. It even includes priority and details. Prepped does something similar when I click “Copy Grocery List”. It generates a grocery task in Focus and updates my markdown notes from my self-hosted instance of FlatNotes. The whole system is interconnected and you can feel the flow. I hate the name “HoneyDo”, but it was intended to be as corny as possible.

All of these apps are mobile-friendly, encrypted behind a proxy, and protected by strict firewall rules. Each lives on its own subdomain - for example, https://{app}.{domain} where app might be rss, tasks, ping, webhook, or push.

They also look great on my phone, complete with custom icons. You’ll notice one called Mint - my stock dashboard. It’s doing a significant amount of work behind the scenes, so I’ll keep this one brief.

Mint.

The dashboard is organized into sections: Crypto, Growth Signals, Profit Opportunities, Top Holdings, Prune Candidates (with Sharpe ratio and volatility scores), Performers/Underperformers, and “All”. Each has logical icons: colored dots for performance, flames or rockets for potential winners, and trend icons for tickers to grab or sell.

Hover over a ticker and you’ll see RSI, PEG, SMA, analyst target price averages, and the latest headline for that stock. Clicking on the ticker opens that stock on my broker and clicking on the arrow next to it opens all related details on Finviz. There are also incredibly handy buttons set to open my custom stock screeners. Data comes from multiple sources and compiles into one clean dashboard. Every market open and close, alerts get sent to Ping, along with other major ticker and crypto updates throughout the day.

Wellness Tracking

This one’s a combo app - one writes while the other reads. The page has sections for calories, exercise, and health metrics. Whenever I eat something, weigh myself, take my blood pressure, or work out, it all gets logged. The original version was written in great detail on this post, though I’m debating whether to update that page.

Every minute, the dashboard updates from my health database and generates visualizations of my overall stats. It now pulls insights from the Oura API - since their app interface is total ass. My Magic Dashboard also includes a custom section showing my calorie and protein intake, so I don’t even need to open my phone or computer to check. There’s more below both of these screenshots, but I didn’t want to flood this post with them. I’m sure you get the idea. One cool feature is that the workouts hit the Twitter API and tweets the activity.

Mark.

This is another that’s free to use with the link above. It’s a markdown note app that’s incredibly quick to load and handy when you need to get an idea down. The storage is local to your browser and my server doesn’t see any of it. It’s completely private and secure over https. If you know how to use markdown, it’s easy to format a document and export it to md or html. You can also hit the preview button to see how it’ll look. It’s mobile friendly and I find myself using this frequently to get ideas down.

That’s all I got for now. I’m going blind, have a headache, and should probably step away from the computer for a while. Hopefully this was entertaining and gives you some future project ideas. Feel free to reach out with comments, questions, or projects that you’ve worked on. You can reach me via the Twitter link on the sidebar.