Building a toolbox

Creating a toolbox website using pure javascript

Whenever I'm working on a project, I often need to use different tools for it. Most of the time I'll be using a command line, however there's times when I need to use tools on the internet. Most of the time I end up googling 'JSON linter' or online nslookup or whatever. Typically you find the website, use it quickly then away you go again.

Well this time I decided, instead of just googling a tool and using it, every time I need a little tool I'd do my best to recreate it. I had this idea just to create a really simple but useful website (tomstechtoolbox.com) that has a bunch of tools that can be used for free.

To keep costs down and to provide a useful / performant service I decided that one design criteria should be that there are no backend services (or as close to none as possible) - that way everythings running in peoples local browsers. Much nicer from a personal data perspective too.

Where possible I'm using a local Llama based LLM to help draft content for the tool, then fine tuning it and deploying

On the tech side I'm really keeping things simple, using Eleventy as a static site generator, which helps in modularising the site - perfect if the idea is to keep adding small tools.

Each tool is then just a simple conversation of some html / markdown and a single javascript file that delivers the tools logic. One additional advantage of building it this way is that because LLM can handle limited context, it enables smaller chunks of code to work on

Posted by Tom on Sat Sep 16 2023 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)