Murad Corp: a small red demon with little horns, hugging a mug of cocoa

Murad Corp

Small things for the internet

We make small software for the web. A blog that lives inside a Telegram channel. A paste bin you can reach with curl. A television that never turns off. A search engine for the personal websites the big ones forgot.

Most of it fits on one server and some of it fits inside a single link. That is deliberate. Small things are cheap to run and easy to fix at two in the morning, and they are still around years later, long after something bigger would have been sunset in a blog post.

We build them, we host most of them ourselves, and we keep them running after launch day.

Small on purpose.

How we work

Five rules. They are short so we remember them on a bad day.

  1. One product, one problem. If it takes a second paragraph to explain, it is probably two products.
  2. Plain files and SQLite before a database server. A cluster only when one machine has honestly run out.
  3. No ads, no tracking pixels, no streaks or badges built to keep you scrolling. Some of our products run on donations, and their front pages say so.
  4. What you put in, you can take out. Leaving should take one click, not a support ticket.
  5. If something is half done, the page says it is half done.
The shelf

Everything below is ours, start to finish. Live unless the line says otherwise.

Writing and publishing

  • bloggram.lol turns a Telegram channel into a blog that search engines can find
  • bimb.ooo a cozy home for text: pastes, markdown pages and tiny static sites
  • pupu.page a room for writing one thing at a time; the words never leave your browser
  • theraven.my a public blog you write and read by email
  • theraven.social a correspondence network that runs on email, with no feed and no likes

Pictures, video and TV

  • phlog.space a photo log that wrecks every upload with one of 36 effects
  • murad.pictures invite-only home for pictures and short videos, with passkey sign-in
  • meet.murad.video Pyramid, voice and video rooms with chat and a broadcast mode
  • infinit.show free TV of classic films and cartoons from the Internet Archive, 24/7

Tools

  • hax0r.lol paste from the browser or from curl; expiry, burn after reading, passwords
  • genmap.app XML sitemaps for pages, images, video and news, with an SEO report

The small web

  • weirdfind.org a search engine for personal sites, blogs and digital gardens
  • weirdnet.org an observatory of the small web: directory, links, letters
  • hax0r.zip news for hackers and programmers, refreshed every two hours
  • murad.wtf our servers drawn as a night sky in text, 80 by 24, every three hours
  • soledade.city a small town made of text, on the web and over netcat

Games

  • Nevermore an idle game where Edgar Allan Poe writes around the clock and fediverse replies play as scenes from his tales

In the workshop

  • RavenMail free contact forms that land in your inbox, funded by donations soon
  • antisocial a place to write and post photos, with no likes and no follower counts no server yet
  • bruteglue collage pages you edit in the browser: drop anything anywhere soon
  • PaCord a headless blog backend you can write to by email, Micropub or API in use, not public
  • runv turns images and text into ANSI and ASCII art that opens in PabloDraw command line
  • RUNV a small network of personal servers with its own protocol, written in C experimental
  • fast-scripts 28 Windows utilities you open with a double-click command line

The workshop is for things that already work but have no public front door yet. We would rather list them with an honest label than leave them off the shelf.

Where it runs

Most of the shelf runs on machines we own and administer, in a rack that grew one box at a time and still has a Pentium in it. Old hardware that stays up for three years is worth more to us than fast hardware that needs babysitting.

The code sits on our own Forgejo, not on someone else's. The hardware has its own page at murad.best.

Talk to us

We take on small, odd jobs. If it fits on one server and you can explain it in a paragraph, we would like to hear about it. If it needs a team of twelve and a roadmap, we are the wrong people, and we will say so quickly.

Email nobody@we-dont-do-email.invalid

Yes, .invalid is real. RFC 2606 reserves it so it can never work, which makes it the only part of our stack with a perfect track record. Anything you send there goes straight to the demon, who reads it, nods slowly and sips his cocoa.

Fediverse @pablo@murad.social (this one has a human)