Welcome back to Link Round Up, our almost-monthly series where we present the tools, tips, tech and stats that stood out to us this month 🔥
As always, this isn’t about the biggest launches or the loudest trends, just the things that made us pause and quietly mutter, “Oh… that’s actually really good”.
If you’re the kind of user that prefers a web browsing experience without sponsored content, AI add-ons, third-party product integrations 👀 and other annoying bloat then Just the Browser is worth a click.
It’s an open-source project that reverts Chrome, Firefox and Edge back to their original purpose.
You still get updates and core web rendering – just without the extra noise.
TextKool’s ASCII tool is great for when you need to generate ASCII art for READMEs, CLI tools, status screens etc.
It’s free to use and there are hundreds of fonts available.
________ _______ .__ _____ __
\_____ \\ _ \ |__| _/ ____\_/ |_ __ _ __
/ ____// /_\ \ | | \ __\ \ __\\ \/ \/ /
/ \\ \_/ \| | | | | | \ /
\_______ \\_____ /|__| |__| |__| \/\_/
\/ \/ Mkris SEO Tools have an excellent AI Optimisation Checker that’s very useful now that so many search results are shaped by AI-driven discovery.
It checks entities, authority, credibility and technical signals to give suggestions on how to tailor your content for AI Search.
Speaking of AI: OpenAI’s Prompt Packs. Don’t let the name fool you – this isn’t copying blocks of text and hoping for magic.
These packs frame prompts as a process of well documented thinking, and is a mindset shift that yields far more value for those using AI as a tool.
Open WebUI feels like self-hosted and local AI has finally crossed the line from “cool demo” to “actually usable”.
This is a big step forward if you want to experiment without handing everything over to a third party.
If you prefer working with the AI giants, you can use the interface to connect to whatever you want all in one place.
You may have missed WordPress’s Interactivity API quietly changing what’s possible inside WordPress blocks.
Allowing elements like toggles, filters and updates to respond to user interaction (without shipping a full JavaScript framework) results in richer behaviour with fewer moving parts.
Some bad news next: the average web page continues to get heavier.
More scripts, more tracking, more “just one more thing” are prevailing against years of performance tooling, best practices and performance-themed blog posts.
This is a useful reminder that optimisation has an ongoing element. What projects are you going to be revisiting this year? Let us know in the comments below!
Moving onto something lighter that caught our attention as a web hosting provider in relentless pursuit of perfect uptime: Low-tech Magazine.
Their solar-powered website slows down, degrades gracefully and sometimes goes offline entirely depending on the weather.
Recent research shows that web projects rely on an increasing number of interdependent packages, forming vast global dependency graphs.
30% of US-based breaches in 2025 can be attributed to unmaintained and abandoned projects.
This leaves us with a thought worth sitting with. Many of the tools you rely on every day are maintained by one person, unpaid, in their spare time.
Tens of thousands of users, one maintainer. It’s inspiring, slightly terrifying and a good reminder to support the open-source projects that quietly keep everything running.
This is one of the reasons we take the harder path and build our solutions in-house; so we truly understand the software that quietly keeps everything running.
Check out some of the best features we developed over the past year here. 💪
What useful new tools, software and tech have you come across this month? Leave a comment and let us know!