Building small tools in public

I'm Nan Liang. I build free browser tools — shift schedules, tournament brackets, seating charts, time card calculators — and I write here about how they're built, shipped, and run.

Latest notes

• Niche Research: My Go/No-Go Validation Workflow

  Niche research workflow: five gates I run every new site idea through before registering a domain, plus the keyword-bias trap that nearly sank one of my sites.

• The 662-Page Indexing Report: Two New States

  All 662 URLs inspected: zero flips on the big site, first Discovered and Crawled states on a 48-page sibling, and a position-21 head term.

• Programmatic SEO Examples: 8 Sites, 946 Pages

  Eight small static tool sites, 946 programmatic pages, one developer, no database — the exact templates, checks, and build gates behind the whole operation.

• Discovered – Currently Not Indexed: Week One Data

  Real Search Console data from week one on nine new static tool sites: what indexed first, what still reads unknown to Google, and the three checks that matter.

• Keyword Matrix: How I Find Gaps My Tool Sites Miss

  A keyword matrix workflow for finding gaps across a family of small tool sites — the real numbers from one run, and the gaps I would otherwise never see.

All notes →

Tools I built

8 free tools, all running in the browser with no signup. See the full list →