{title === \"Val Town Blog\" ? title : `${title}

\n \n

\n\nWe hope you give it a shot, and are very eager to hear what you think.\n\nStart coding with Townie here: [val.town/townie](https://townie.val.run/)\n\nps - Townie is\n[100% open-source & is hosted on Val Town](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/Townie)",[],[380,389],"a179a2dc-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","2025-06-03-newsletter-25.md","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-9b7140811546",["D",1754596598729],"---\ntitle: Newsletter 25\ndescription: Mutli-file vals, local development, new Townie, new Search, and much more\npubDate: 2025-06-03T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nVal Town has gotten a lot more powerful. \n\nVals now support multiple files, folders, and branches. You can edit vals locally with your favorite editor via the `vt` CLI. Townie, our AI coding assistant, uses Claude 4 Sonnet to agentically read and write your vals. We've been supporting companies using Val Town to automate workflows and build internal tools.\n\nOur roadmap is packed with the powerful features you've been requesting: Team Accounts, SOC2, Logs & Traces API, OAuth, and much more.\n\nAs always, we save the best part of the newsletter for last: a collection of the best new vals from all of you in the community 🤩\n\n## 🗂️ Multi-file Vals\n\nWe rebuilt vals from the ground-up to support multiple files and folders. Vals are now like GitHub repos – including branches and pull requests – but the code is instantly deployed, and scales as hosted web services. We rebuilt [Townie](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/Townie), [Search](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/vtProjectSearch), and even [this very blog you're reading right now](/migration) as vals.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nAs show in this video above, vals now support:\n\n- Multiple files & folders\n- Branches, three-way merges, and pull requests\n- Custom [subdomains](https://docs.val.town/vals/http/custom-subdomains/) & [email addresses](https://docs.val.town/vals/email/#custom-email-address)\n\n## 🦾 New Townie\n\nWe rebuilt Townie from the ground-up around multi-file vals. It uses agentic tool-calling, powered by Claude 4 Sonnet, to read and write your code. It can even make test HTTP calls to see how things are working, and keep iterating from there.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nTownie is available only for [Val Town Pro](https://www.val.town/pricing) users during a limited free preview. We are adding the ability to purchase credits.\n\nBecause Townie was built [100% open-source and in userspace](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/Townie), you can read the code, system prompts, and even remix & run it in your account. Pull requests welcome.\n\n## ＞ Local development\n\nOne of the biggest feature request for Val Town has always been to edit vals with your favorite editor. Now you can with the [`vt` CLI](https://github.com/val-town/vt).\n\n

\n \n

\n\nThe `vt watch` command brings the classic Val Town deploy-on-every-save experience to your favorite IDE. (Especially with [the browser extension that automatically reloads your browser tab](https://github.com/val-town/vt?tab=readme-ov-file#watching-for-changes).) However, that doesn't mean you're deploying to *production* on every save. As shown in the video above, Val Town means you're always developing directly in your *production environment*, but you choose when to deploy directly on `main` or in a branch preview that you can merge in when ready.\n\n## Val Town for Teams\n\nIf you think Val Town is useful in your personal life, wait till you bring it to work! Our customers have saved hundreds of hours building custom tools like:\n\n- **[GitHub x Slack Automations](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/GitHub-PR-Automation)**: Auto-assign PRs, enforce labels, streamline PR approvals, and surface GitHub issues in Slack.\n- **[Hubspot Leads Deep Research](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/Hubspot-Research)**: Generate AI deep research-powered reports on new HubSpot leads. Optionally convert them into audio feeds for on-the-go listening.\n- **[Discord → Linear Tickets](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/Discord-to-Linear)**: React to messages with a designated emoji to instantly create a Linear ticket, with full context.\n- **[Changelog Generator](https://www.val.town/x/charmaine/Change-Logs-Generator)**: Auto-generate changelogs from GitHub commits and share them in Discord for review before publishing.\n\n**We'd love to help you too!** Our Val Town for Teams plan includes private VIP support on Slack Connect, hands-on help building custom workflows and onboarding your team, and higher limits across the board.\n\n

💌 Email charmaine@val.town to save your team hours every week.

\n\n## New Search\n\nWe rebuilt [Val Town Search](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/vtProjectSearch) for the multi-file vals. It's much faster and gives exact matches. (It runs on [Val Town SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/), and uses `like`.) It searches across public val source code, usernames, and our docs.\n\n

\n\nSearch was built [100% open-source & in userspace](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/vtProjectSearch). With one-click, you can remix it to your account: it'll start reading from the public val firehose API, and index all public val code into your [Val Town SQLite](https://docs.val.town/std/sqlite/). If you want to make an improvement to search, or build something on top of that index, please do! The power of userspace 💪\n\n## Town Hall\n\nWe held our very first Val Town Hall!\n\n\n\nWe got a chance to share what we're building at Val Town, and see 9 lovely demos from the community. Everybody really pulled together to make it an action-packed hour. If you're curious to know what's going on in the town, this is a must-watch.\n\n### Val Town Hall #2\n\nWe scheduled the next Val Town Hall for **June 25th, 12pm ET**. **[Register here to participate or demo.](https://town-hall.val.run/)**\n\n## Roadmap\n\n- Logs & Traces API (to power `vt tail` & Townie reading logs)\n- UI improvements branch & pull request flows\n- UI improvements to Logs\n- Deno LSP to dramatically improve the browser editing experience\n- Townie credits & other improvements\n- UI improvements to val version history\n- Team Accounts\n- \"Login with Val Town\" OAuth\n- SOC2\n- Ability to lock/protect a main branch\n- Comments on vals (again, but better, ie on lines)\n- Comments on pull requests\n- Improve the discoverability of vals\n- Binary file support in vals\n- Infinite scale vals with usage-based pricing\n- WebSocket vals\n- UI & keyboard affordances to help you import from Val Town, npm, jsr\n\n## 🌟 Community Vals\n- [**Geoffrey Litt**](https://www.val.town/u/geoffreylitt)'s [Stevens](https://www.val.town/x/geoffreylitt/stevensDemo) went viral on HackerNews. It's a personal AI Assistant, you can read more about how he built it on [his blog](https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-ai-assistant-with-one-sqlite-table-and-a-handful-of-cron-jobs). \n- [**Brad Noble**](https://www.val.town/u/bradnoble) made [Val Town for Notion](https://www.val.town/x/bradnoble/ValTownForNotion), a great demo accompanied by a post about using Val Town to unlock Notion’s full potential, and vice versa.\n- [**Fiberplane**](https://www.val.town/u/fiberplane) made [OpenTelemetryCollector](https://www.val.town/x/fiberplane/OpenTelemetryCollector), which receive traces and store it in SQLite.\n- [**bgschiller**](https://www.val.town/u/bgschiller) made [personalShopper](https://www.val.town/x/bgschiller/personalShopper/), which turns any grocery list into a Kroger cart full of groceries.\n- [**Moe**](https://www.val.town/u/moe) made [MiniAppStarter](https://www.val.town/x/moe/MiniAppStarter), a Hono + React + Tailwind + Farcaster Mini App Starter Project. This has taken off in the Farcaster community and we've been seeing lots of new mini apps! You can find other Farcaster starters directly on [moe's profile](https://www.val.town/u/moe).\n- [**Smirfolio**](https://www.val.town/u/smirfolio) made [petitPrince](https://www.val.town/x/smirfolio/petitPrince), a child-friendly article summarizer.\n- [**tmcw**](https://www.val.town/u/tmcw) made [timeline](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/timeline), an online card game for 2+ players: draw historical‑event cards and race to slot them into the correct timeline.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [FileDumpThing](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/FileDumpThing) so you can easily share files and text snippets by pasting or uploading them and getting a URL in return. This is very handy for dropping gifs into val READMEs.\n- [**Michael Schultz**](https://www.val.town/u/michaelwschultz) made [eink-frame](https://www.val.town/x/michaelwschultz/eink-frame) for information screens designed to be shown on an e-ink display.\n- [**Wilhelm**](https://www.val.town/u/wilhelm) made [ProtoRuns](https://www.val.town/x/wilhelm/ProtoRuns), which lets you track and store your physical runs on ATProto.\n- [**Loading**](https://www.val.town/u/loading) made [url-project](https://www.val.town/x/loading/url-project), a simple URL shortener application built on Val Town.\n- [**c15r**](https://www.val.town/u/c15r) made [ProtoShare](https://www.val.town/x/c15r/ProtoShare), a secure backend system for iOS share sheet shortcuts.\n- [**Cam Pak**](https://www.val.town/u/cameronpak) made [voicemessages](https://www.val.town/x/cameronpak/voicemessages), a web app for recording, transcribing, and sharing voice notes with expiration controls.\n- [**Salon**](https://www.val.town/u/salon) made [mandate](https://www.val.town/x/salon/mandate), a val that helps you set up AI agents through a registry and workflow definitions.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [Electric](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/Electric), a lightweight static site hosting system built on Hono RPC and Val Town blob store, with a simple CLI.\n- [**supagroova**](https://www.val.town/u/supagroova) made [LiveStormMCP](https://www.val.town/x/supagroova/LiveStormMCP), a val that is hosting a Livestorm MCP server.\n- [**Malcolm Ocean**](https://www.val.town/u/malcolmocean) made [FlexCal](https://www.val.town/x/malcolmocean/FlexCal), a flexible Google Calendar alternative interface that syncs 2 way with Google Calendar via OAuth.\n- [**Max**](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) made [esm](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/esm), a fast content-type friendly proxy for esm.town.\n- [**Alex Wein**](https://www.val.town/u/alexwein) made [gordwame](https://www.val.town/x/alexwein/gordwame), a word game.\n- [**nucky**](https://www.val.town/u/nucky) made [book-lookup-notion](https://www.val.town/x/nucky/book-lookup-notion), which uses the Google Book API to look up bibliographic metadata elements. The val thumnail is a great gif.\n- [**chadparker**](https://www.val.town/u/chadparker) made [endpoints](https://www.val.town/x/chadparker/endpoints) for interacting with Notion DB.\n- [**artivilla**](https://www.val.town/u/artivilla) made [fren](https://www.val.town/x/artivilla/fren), an app for browsing, searching, and copying AI prompts, similar to [ray.so/prompts/browser](https://ray.so/prompts/browser).\n- [**probablycorey**](https://www.val.town/u/probablycorey) (who started Atom and Electron at GitHub!) made [mini-remix](https://www.val.town/x/probablycorey/mini-remix), which lets you write server side and client side react code in the same file and render it to a val.\n- [**ije**](https://www.val.town/u/ije) made [mono-jsx](https://www.val.town/x/ije/mono-jsx/main.tsx), mono-jsx just works on Val Town!\n- [**boucher**](https://www.val.town/u/boucher) made [vt-discord](https://www.val.town/x/boucher/vt-discord), which stores your chats and shared links on a private server, and lets Claude AI search and analyze them.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [logoWorkshopOpenMoji](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/logoWorkshopOpenMoji), an SDK to generate logos directly in code.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [NPLLM](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/NPLLM), a clone of the npm website with search functionality, package detail pages, and the ability to download npm packages as tar files.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [demoCamera](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/demoCamera), a floating webcam component that you can easily add to any val.\n- [**prashamtrivedi**](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) made [promptfixer](https://www.val.town/x/prashamtrivedi/promptfixer), a prompt fixing service with form and email processing.\n- [**elouan**](https://www.val.town/u/elouan) made [oceaniverse](https://www.val.town/x/elouan/oceaniverse), a [pondiverse](https://www.val.town/x/todepond/pondiverse) store.\n- [**bradley**](https://www.val.town/u/bradley) made [litebrite](https://www.val.town/x/bradley/litebrite), a little web‑app version of the classic Lite‑Brite toy.\n- [**Steve Krouse**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [live-reload](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/live-reload), middleware for live-reloading HTTP vals during development. (We use it to edit this blog!)\n- [**gwoods22**](https://www.val.town/u/gwoods22) made [cp24-digest](https://www.val.town/x/gwoods22/cp24-digest), a val that manages [CP24](https://www.cp24.com/) email alerts by recieving them, storing them in a blob, and displaying them here.\n- [**Nico Baier**](https://www.val.town/u/nbbaier) made [thirdTimer](https://www.val.town/x/nbbaier/thirdTimer), a web app implementing the \"Third Time\" productivity method. [neverstew](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) [remixed it](https://www.val.town/x/neverstew/thirdTimer) with visual displays.\n- [**pomdtr**](https://www.val.town/u/pomdtr) made [tinyfeed](https://www.val.town/x/pomdtr/tinyfeed), which generate a static HTML page from a collection of feeds.\n- [**thirdsouth**](https://www.val.town/u/thirdsouth) made [Mercury](https://www.val.town/x/thirdsouth/Mercury), which connects Mercury's Bank API to Slack so you can check account balance, view recent transactions, get notifications etc directly in Slack.\n- [**cmknz**](https://www.val.town/u/cmknz) made [maine-bills-tax](https://www.val.town/x/cmknz/maine-bills-tax), which summarizes all of the current pending bills that could impact taxes in the State of Maine.\n- [**kamalnrf**](https://www.val.town/u/kamalnrf) made [MailGoat](https://www.val.town/x/kamalnrf/MailGoat), which automatically organizes your emails with custom labels.\n- [**Wolf**](https://www.val.town/u/wolf) made [instagramScraping](https://www.val.town/x/wolf/instagramScraping), which extracts image and caption data from Instagram posts.\n- [**colingourlay**](https://www.val.town/u/colingourlay) made [supernote-crosswords](https://www.val.town/x/colingourlay/supernote-crosswords), which uploads daily crosswords to your Supernote.\n- [**humbl**](https://www.val.town/u/humbl) made [figma-variables-manager](https://www.val.town/x/humbl/figma-variables-manager), a Figma plugin that syncs variables from external sources like Notion and Coda.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [build.moi](https://build.moi/), a social showcase for your Val Town vals, like TikTok but Val Town! ([YouTube demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxXomaA4hYY))\n- [**yakuzadave**](https://www.val.town/u/yakuzadave) made [notionWidgets](https://www.val.town/x/yakuzadave/notionWidgets), a way to be able to host your own Notion Widgets using Val Town.\n- [**jpchip**](https://www.val.town/u/jpchip) made [GlobalEntryAppointmentChecker](https://www.val.town/x/jpchip/GlobalEntryAppointmentChecker), which emails you when global entry appointments are available.\n- [**nucky**](https://www.val.town/u/nucky) made [notion-2-bluesky](https://www.val.town/x/nucky/notion-2-bluesky), which lets you auto-schedule Bluesky posts from a Notion DB.\n- [**Llad**](https://www.val.town/u/Llad) made [Gardenon](https://www.val.town/x/Llad/Gardenon), to help map your garden and track information about each plant.\n- [**Steve Krouse**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [profile-pics](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/profile-pics), a Val Town Profile Pic Proxy.\n- [**stu43005**](https://www.val.town/u/stu43005) made [hololiveAnniversaryIcs](https://www.val.town/x/stu43005/hololiveAnniversaryIcs), for tracking anniversary dates for Hololive (a virtual YouTuber agency).\n- [**jamiedubs**](https://www.val.town/u/jamiedubs) made [twitterCompetitorMonitoring](https://www.val.town/x/jamiedubs/twitterCompetitorMonitoring) to track tweets mentioning competitor URLs and visualizes the data in charts.\n- [**We at Val Town**](https://www.val.town/u/valdottown) made [door](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/door) for Val Town office guests to open the door through their phone, like [this](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/door/pull/ef854848-34b0-11f0-9887-9e149126039e)!\n- [**Joey Hiller**](https://www.val.town/u/jhiller) made [ValTown-Package-Tracker](https://www.val.town/x/jhiller/ValTown-Package-Tracker) to track a package of sensors he was sending from Oakland to us in Downtown Brooklyn!\n- [**dinavinter**](https://www.val.town/u/dinavinter) made [slack](https://www.val.town/x/dinavinter/slack), a Slack bot that uses OpenAI to generate responses.\n- [**prashamtrivedi**](https://www.val.town/u/prashamtrivedi) made [hn-remote-ts-genai-jobs](https://www.val.town/x/prashamtrivedi/hn-remote-ts-genai-jobs), to track Hacker News' Who's Hiring filter for remote TypeScript + GenAI-related jobs.\n- [**dcm31**](https://www.val.town/u/dcm31) made [rotrank](https://www.val.town/x/dcm31/rotrank), an ELO ranking system for popular Italian Brainrot characters.\n- [**tmcw**](https://www.val.town/u/tmcw) made [bluesky-thinkup-tribute](https://www.val.town/x/tmcw/bluesky-thinkup-tribute), so you can know when people you follow update their descriptions on Bluesky.\n- [**Alex Brinsmead**](https://www.val.town/u/abrinz) made [autonomous-val](https://www.val.town/x/abrinz/autonomous-val), a demo on how to build autonomous agents on Val Town that can be triggered by API calls, cron jobs, etc.\n- [**pomdtr**](https://www.val.town/u/pomdtr) made [extract-feeds](https://www.val.town/x/pomdtr/extract-feeds) to extract RSS feeds from an HTML page.\n- [**curtcox**](https://www.val.town/u/curtcox) made [wwtdotcom](https://www.val.town/x/curtcox/wwtdotcom), a proxy for wwt.com that rewrites all links to stay within the proxy and injects a help widget on every page.\n- [**ashryanio**](https://www.val.town/u/ashryanio) made [halpk](https://www.val.town/x/ashryanio/halpk), which fetches the RSS feed from Astoria Tech's Subcurrent blog and displays a random blog post each time the page is loaded. He also made [subcurrentShuffle](https://www.val.town/x/ashryanio/subcurrentShuffle) with Townie in 15 minutes at that same meetup!\n- [**Cam Pak**](https://www.val.town/u/cameronpak) made [groq-api](https://www.val.town/x/cameronpak/groq-api), a simple API using the AI SDK and Groq.\n- [**mgmarlow**](https://www.val.town/u/mgmarlow) made [aposd-red-flags](https://www.val.town/x/mgmarlow/aposd-red-flags), a simple flashcard app to help learn about common software design red flags from the book A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.\n- [**JJG**](https://www.val.town/u/jjg) made [blockbench-plugin](https://www.val.town/x/jjg/blockbench-plugin), which fetches JavaScript or TypeScript files from GitHub repositories or Gists and serves them with the proper content type headers.\n- [**Steve Krouse**](https://www.val.town/u/stevekrouse) made [luciaMagicLinkStarter](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/luciaMagicLinkStarter) to roll-your-own auth & magic link login using Lucia.\n- [**Max**](https://www.val.town/u/maxm) made [sqlitelogs](https://www.val.town/x/maxm/sqlitelogs), a logging system that stores logs in SQLite with a web interface and search functionality.\n- [**orjpap**](https://www.val.town/u/orjpap) made a blog analytics system using Val Town's SQLite to track visitors and page views.\n- [**Payton**](https://www.val.town/u/payton) made [Privy Pay](https://privy.io/blog/onchain-payments-with-privy-pay), a tap to pay experience with Farcaster mini apps using NFC technology.\n- [**yawnxyz**](https://www.val.town/u/yawnxyz) made [andp](https://www.val.town/x/yawnxyz/andp/index.tsx), a demo of embedding Observable in Val Town.\n- [**neverstew**](https://www.val.town/u/neverstew) made [voweltown](https://www.val.town/x/neverstew/voweltown), an interactive website to explore vowels across different languages.",[],[380,396],"a1799ec2-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","2025-05-23-glitch.md","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-962c779d0b4f",["D",1754596598729],"---\ntitle: Val Town for Glitch Users\ndescription: Saying goodbye to a platform we admired\npubDate: 2025-05-23T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Tom MacWright\n---\n\nThe [news yesterday is that Glitch is shutting down](https://blog.glitch.com/post/changes-are-coming-to-glitch/).\nVal Town has always been inspired by Glitch - they paved the way\nfor zero-configuration instantly-edited websites.\nIt's a bummer that what brought so many people joy\nand [was a great community for diverse communities](https://blog.keith.is/blog/the-end-of-glitch-even-though-they-say-it-isnt/)\nis coming to an end.\n\nSo: where does Val Town fit into this? Depending on how you were\nusing Glitch, we could be a new home for you. But Val Town isn't a drop-in\nreplacement for Glitch, and I am no macabre salesperson so here's the basics:\n\n## Val Town is for TypeScript projects\n\nWe support static text files, TypeScript projects that work on the backend\nand the frontend, and frameworks like React. There are lots of batteries built-in:\nsending and receiving emails, an SQLite, blob storage, scheduling code\nto run, and all of the functionality unlocked by importing modules from\nNPM.\n\nGlitch also supported static websites, as well as bundlers, like Vite. We don't\nsupport those things right now, so stuff won't transfer over automatically.\n\n## Val Town supports online editing and instant reload\n\nNow that's the part where it matches: we have invested a lot of time into our\neditor and site so that it's easy to do everything you need to without\ninstalling any extra software. But we _also_ support a great desktop\nflow with our [beta vt tool](https://github.com/val-town/vt), so if you\nlike using VS Code or Cursor, there's a home for you here.\n\n## Val Town is also a startup\n\nI've been around for a while. Startups are hard to rely on. There's no way I'm\ngoing to promise that your Val Town projects will still work in the year 2500,\nbecause we both know that I'd be lying. Like Glitch, we've raised money from\nventure capital and it is currently what pays our paychecks and server bills.\nIf it runs out and we haven't become profitable or found an acquirer, that'll\nbe curtains.\n\nWith that out of the way, I can tell you two things. First, Val Town is really\nefficient. From day one, we've been building on abstractions that let us run\ncode cheaply at scale. Stuff that's magically good, like [Deno](https://deno.com/), and\nwasn't available when Glitch was getting started. So keeping the lights on in\na technical sense is not a huge concern: we aren't provisioning a whole server\nevery time that you run a val.\n\nAnd with that, we've also got a pretty long runway, given those low costs, so\nwe've got some time to get our accounting in the black: and we fully intend\nto become profitable. We're currently working hard to find design partners,\nbuilt out our paid offerings, and make sure that we aren't burning CPU\ncycles on anything unnecessary.\n\n## Give it a shot\n\nI hope that a commonality between Glitch and Val Town is that we're both\n_fun_. So anyway, if you're leaving Glitch or just looking to tinker with code\nin a way that feels lightweight, casual, and joyful, [give Val Town a shot](https://www.val.town/).",[],[380,403],"a1799af8-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","2025-04-23-upgrading.md","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-90623236de03",["D",1754596598729],"---\ntitle: Upgrading vals\ndescription: Vals are being upgraded to support multiple files, folders, and more\npubDate: 2025-04-23T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\nToday, we’re unifying our two primitives — *vals* and *projects* — into a single primitive: the **val**, with the best features of both.\n\nHistorically, vals have been simple and lightweight, but limited to a single file. This upgrade will preserve the elegant spirit of our platform while supporting more complex code and collaborative workflows. This upgrade will help you create bigger things on Val Town – APIs, internal tools, fullstack apps, blogs ([like this one](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/blog)), and much more – without sacrificing the simplicity you've always loved about vals.\n\n*Legacy vals* will temporarily become *projects* during this migration. Post-migration, the concept of *projects* will disappear entirely — leaving only upgraded *vals*. In short: *legacy vals* → *projects* → *vals*.\n\n## Timeline\n\nFor most users, no upgrade action is required. We’ll auto-migrate your vals next week. All existing HTTP endpoints, crons, email handlers, and custom domains will be preserved.\n\nFor those with mission-critical vals or who use our API to edit or create vals, you can start upgrading your legacy vals today and integrating with our updated API.\n\n- **April 23, 2025** – Announcement of changes & API deprecations.\n- **April 30, 2025** – All remaining *legacy vals* auto-upgraded. Deprecated API routes become read-only.\n- **May 1, 2025** – The term *projects* will no longer exist — everything will simply be a *val*.\n\nIf you need more time, please contact us at [help@val.town](mailto:help@val.town) and we'll work with you.\n\n## Upgrading\n\nWe will upgrade all remaining legacy vals on **April 30, 2025**.\n\nYou can proactively upgrade by:\n\n- Going to the **Settings** of any legacy val.\n- Clicking **Upgrade**.\n\n[See more details in our docs.](https://docs.val.town/upgrading/legacy-vals)\n\n## API Changes\n\nToday, we're introducing the following API routes:\n\n```bash\nGET /v2/vals\nPOST /v2/vals\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id} \nDELETE /v2/vals/{val_id}\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches/{branch_id}\nDELETE /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches/{branch_id}\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches\nPOST /v2/vals/{val_id}/branches\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nPOST /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nDELETE /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nPUT /v2/vals/{val_id}/files\nGET /v2/vals/{val_id}/files/content\nGET /v2/alias/vals/{username}/{val_name}\nGET /v2/me/vals\n```\n\n_Note: During this transition, `{val_id}` is your `project ID`. You can grab it by clicking `Copy` > `Copy project ID` on any new val._\n\nWe are deprecating these routes:\n\n```bash\n* /v1/vals/*\n* /v1/projects/*\nGET /v1/alias/{username}/{val_name}\nGET /v1/alias/projects/{username}/{project_name}\nGET /v1/me/comments\nGET /v1/me/references\nGET /v1/me/likes\nGET /v1/me/projects\nGET /v1/users/{user_id}/vals\n```\n\nView our [updated API reference here](https://docs.val.town/openapi).\n\nAll `v1/vals` API routes become read-only on **April 30, 2025**. If you rely on *writing* to those routes, please upgrade to our new `v2/vals` API. All deprecated API routes will continue serving historical legacy val data.\n\n### SDK changes\nWe've also released a new major version of the [Val Town SDK](https://github.com/val-town/sdk/tree/main), `v1.0.0`, using these new endpoints. The deprecated routes above are not accessible in this new version of the SDK.\n\nUnpinned SDK imports will automatically pull the latest version upon your next edit / save. At that point, your SDK calls will temporarily break until you upgrade. To upgrade, update every mention of `projects` → `vals`, `projectName` → `valName`. \n\n## What's next\n\n1. Upgrade your mission-critical vals early.\n2. Update your Val Town API & SDK usage to `/v2` routes.\n3. All remaining legacy vals migrate on **April 30, 2025**.\n4. Migration completes on **May 1, 2025**.\n\nWe're committed to making this transition smooth for you — reach out anytime via [email](mailto:help@val.town) or [Discord](http://discord.val.town/) if you need assistance. We appreciate your help and patience through this migration.",[],[380,410],"a1799436-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","2025-04-08-migration.md","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-8cd53d85a87f",["D",1754596598729],"---\ntitle: The Val Town Blog is now hosted on Val Town\ndescription: We migrated this blog to Val Town Projects\npubDate: 2025-04-08T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Steve Krouse\n---\n\n![street-blog-web.jpg](https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/4abb41d0-f710-46b4-523e-4440a252f400/public)\n\nWe migrated our blog to Val Town 🥳\n\nWith some cleverness, we were able to build it and migrate 65 old blog posts in one day. Now our deployments happen instantly (~100ms), and we've greatly simplified our blogging stack.\n\n| | Before | Now |\n|---------------------|---------------------------|------------|\n| **Rendering** | Astro | React |\n| **Version control** | GitHub | Val Town |\n| **Text editing** | Local editor | Val Town |\n| **Deployment** | Cloudflare Pages + GitHub | Val Town |\n| **Hosting** | Cloudflare Pages | Val Town |\n| **CDN** | Cloudflare | Cloudflare |\n\n## Should you blog on Val Town? \n\nMaybe! It depends on your constraints and what matters to you. We care deeply about:\n\n1. Tight feedback loops\n2. Simple, browser-based workflows\n3. A fast migration\n\nWe also care deeply about dogfooding, but unless you're us – and unfortunately most of you aren't – that one doesn't apply to you.\n\nThere are also good reasons *not* to migrate to Val Town, but we'll get to them later.\n\n## Tight feedback loops\n\nWe at Val Town are obsessed with tight feedback loops. \n\n> \"Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating.\"\n> \n> – Bret Victor, \"Inventing on Principle\"\n\nIn some ways, this singular commitment to tight feedback loops is what separates Val Town from all other code hosting & deployment platforms. We believe that you should be able to *iterate directly in your production environment*, not iterate locally, then deploy, then wait minutes to see how things look live.\n\n

\n \n

\n\nIn Val Town, a save *is* a deploy, and it happens in about 100ms. We go to great technical lengths to make this possible. This means no waiting minutes to see what your post looks like live. You get the fast local dev experience, but with production. And this goes for branches too. Every edit of every branch is instantly deployed in a shareable URL.\n\n## Simple, browser-based workflow\n\nVal Town lets you use fewer tools. It replaces:\n\n* your local text editor,\n* git + GitHub for version control\n* whatever you use for deployment and hosting, Cloudflare, Vercel, Render, Railway, Heroku, Digital Ocean, Hertzner, etc\n\nSimpler, browser-based workflows are particularly important for casual contributors, such as less technical folks on your team or strangers on the internet. Val Town is a single website for code to be edited, versioned, collaborated on, and deployed. No need for anyone to install or use git, clone the repo locally, install programming languages and dependencies, or use a local text editor. \n\nFor example, here's how to make a change to this blog that you're reading right now:\n\n

\n \n

\n\nVal Town is uniquely positioned to allow anyone see their changes deployed live in their remix, because we host both your source code *and* your deployments. \n\n## A fast migration\n\nHow did we migrate 65 blog posts – with images, videos, and intricate formatting and styles – to an entirely new blog in a single day?\n\nWe didn't. We left them where they are, and proxy to them.\n\nWriting a proxy in Val Town (or any functions platform with the ['fetch handler' interface](https://blog.val.town/blog/the-api-we-forgot-to-name/)) is a delight:\n\n```ts\nconst OLD_BLOG_HOST = \"https://val-town-blog.pages.dev/\";\nexport async function proxy(req: Request): Promise {\n const url = new URL(req.url);\n return fetch(OLD_BLOG_HOST + url.pathname + url.search, {\n method: req.method,\n headers: req.headers,\n });\n}\n```\n\nSo if you go to view [blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-24](https://blog.val.town/blog/val-town-newsletter-24)\nyou'll see exactly what you would at [val-town-blog.pages.dev/blog/val-town-newsletter-24](https://val-town-blog.pages.dev/blog/val-town-newsletter-24). I find it eerie that proxies work so well.\n\nWe've had reasonable success with this technique of migrating to Val Town quickly by proxying most old content, and only rebuilding the homepage and new posts. I first used this technique on my personal website, [stevekrouse.com](https://stevekrouse.com), and was pleased to see it continue to work here.\n\n## Good reasons *not* to blog on Val Town\n\n1. Val Town Projects are beta software, so you'd be on the cutting-edge alongside us. We're coming up with patterns that you'd get for free from mature blogging tools like Astro and Cloudflare Pages.\n2. Val Town doesn't have good workflows for bundlers or build steps, so it's hard to use anything that requires vite, etc.\n3. Val Town doesn't (yet) have pull request comments.\n\nPersonally, I value simplicity, so I don't mind building a basic blog from scratch without a bundler with some help from AI. I do miss pull requests comments though. We plan on building them soon.\n\n## Bad reasons *not* to blog on Val Town\n\n1. **Lock-in**. Val Town is built on Deno and web standards, so you can easily leave for another deployment platform like Cloudflare, Vercel, or Deno Deploy. We'll even help you migrate. We believe in the open web.\n\n2. **Price**. We have a generous free tier, so your blog can go viral on HN, get 100k hits in a day, and you pay $0. It's $10 / month for 1m code runs per day. Need additional scale beyond that? It's still $10 / month while our Scale Plan is in beta. When ready, our scale pricing will be in line with other FaaS providers.\n\n## Get yourself a Val Town blog\n\nIf you are starting a new blog from scratch, remix [this markdown blog starter](https://www.val.town/x/stevekrouse/markdownBlogStarter).\n\nIf you are migrating an existing blog, feel free to remix [the Val Town blog](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/blog). It comes with good patterns for proxying to old content.",[],[380,417],"a179910c-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","2025-04-02-post-mortem-db-migration.md","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-881aaca25175",["D",1754596598729],"---\ntitle: \"Post-mortem: A Backward Incompatible Database Migration\"\ndescription: Val runs failed due to a database migration that was not backward compatible\npubDate: 2025-04-02T00:00:00.000Z\nauthor: Sophie Houser\n---\n\nToday at 10:11am we experienced a 12-minute outage, which caused HTTP vals to return 503 errors and other types of vals to fail. In the end, the root cause was a deployment timing issue where database migrations were deployed successfully, but our application code deployment hung for several minutes. The new database migrations were incompatible with the old application code and crashed the process. \n\nWe aim to make all database migrations maintain backward compatibility, but in this case, we only discovered through the delayed deployment feedback that the new migrations were not compatible with previous versions.\n\n## Timeline\n\n- **10:11AM ET** - We merged the new migration and application code\n- **10:16AM ET** - We got pinged for downtime\n- **10:17AM ET** - We posted that HTTP vals are down in the new #service-status channel\n- **10:18AM ET** - The new application code deployment was still lagging\n- **10:19AM ET** - We rolled back to an earlier deployment on Render, which Render rejected because the earlier migration had succeeded, so the ‘old migration’ check prevented it from entering production.\n- **10:22AM ET** - We pushed something we thought could be a fix\n- **10:28AM ET** - We notified everyone that we’re back up.\n\n## Impact\n\n- HTTP vals returned 503 errors for ~12 minutes, and all other val types did not run.\n- The [val.town](http://val.town) site remained up.\n\n## Next Steps\n\nReliability is important to us and we’ve taken steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We’ve added a test to ensure database migrations are backward compatible, which we’ll run before we deploy any new code that includes database migrations.",[],[380,424],"a179bf4c-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84",["D",1754596598729],[196,197,198,199,200,201,202,203],[380],"a1798ef0-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","util.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-83444ea0f0f7","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-85e00a4689a3",["D",1754596598729],"export function formatDate(dateString: string): string {\n try {\n const date = new Date(dateString);\n return date.toLocaleDateString('en-US', {\n year: 'numeric',\n month: 'long',\n day: 'numeric'\n });\n } catch (e) {\n return dateString;\n }\n}\n\nexport function dayOfWeek(dateString: string): string {\n try {\n return new Date(dateString).toLocaleDateString(\"en-US\", {\n weekday: \"short\",\n });\n } catch (e) {\n return \"\";\n }\n}\n",[],[442,435],"components","a1798a36-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","icons.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-7ca3fa51cd79",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n\nexport function RSSIcon (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function TwitterIcon (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function GitHubIcon (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function BlueskyIcon (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function DiscordIcon (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n );\n}\n\n",[],[442,444],"a17988e2-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","SocialLinks.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-7a74d2d5eb56",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport { BlueskyIcon, DiscordIcon, GitHubIcon, RSSIcon, TwitterIcon } from \"./icons.tsx\";\n\nexport default function SocialLinks() {\n return (\n

\n \n View source\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n

\n );\n}",[],[442,451],"a1797ea6-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","OGImage.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-747c1cac3df3",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport wrap from \"https://esm.sh/word-wrap@1.2.5\";\n\nconst LINE_HEIGHT = 72;\n\nexport default function OGImage({\n title = \"Val Town Blog\",\n ...props\n}: React.SVGProps & {\n title?: string;\n}) {\n const wrapped = wrap(title, { width: 44 });\n const lines = wrapped.split(/\\n/g);\n\n return (\n \n \n {lines.map((line, i) => (\n \n {line}\n \n ))}\n\n \n\n \n Blog\n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}",[],[442,458],"a1797cb2-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","LogoMark.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-713b4ebf3c2f",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n\nexport default function(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n\nexport function Favicon(props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n \n \n );\n}",[],[442,465],"a1797410-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","Logo.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-6d24ca58bea3",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\n\nexport default function (props: React.SVGProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n \n );\n}\n",[],[442,472],"a179724e-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","Layout.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-683c89cce67f",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport React from \"https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0\";\nimport type { BlogPost } from \"../utils/types.ts\";\nimport Footer from \"./Footer.tsx\";\nimport Head from \"./Head.tsx\";\nimport Logo from \"./Logo.tsx\";\nimport LogoMark from \"./LogoMark.tsx\";\nimport SocialLinks from \"./SocialLinks.tsx\";\n\ninterface LayoutProps {\n title: string;\n children: React.ReactNode;\n post?: BlogPost;\n}\n\nexport function Layout({ title, post, children }: LayoutProps) {\n return (\n \n \n \n

\n \n \n \n

\n \n

\n \n Blog\n \n

\n {children}\n

\n \n \n );\n}",[],[442,479],"a179700a-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","HomePage.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-67526ab3a2d6",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport React from \"https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0\";\nimport { BlogPost } from \"../utils/types.ts\";\nimport { Layout } from \"./Layout.tsx\";\nimport Byline from \"./Byline.tsx\";\n\nexport function HomePage({ posts }: { posts: BlogPost[] }) {\n const latest = posts.at(0);\n const top = posts.slice(1, 3);\n const rest = posts.slice(3);\n\n return (\n \n

\n Latest\n

\n \n {latest.title}\n \n

\n \n

{latest.description}

\n Recent\n

\n {top.map((post, i) => (\n

\n {post.title}\n

\n \n

\n {post.description}\n

\n ))}\n

\n More posts\n

\n
\n {post.title}\n
\n \n
\n {post.description}\n
\n

\n \n );\n}",[],[442,486],"a179695c-73c8-11f0-b612-0224a6c84d84","Head.tsx","0198861b-6414-73fe-9aef-6234237c72ff",["D",1754596598729],"/** @jsxImportSource https://esm.sh/react@18.2.0 */\nimport { readFile } from \"https://esm.town/v/std/utils/index.ts\";\nimport { BLOG_URL, SITE_DESCRIPTION } from \"../utils/constants.ts\";\nimport type { BlogPost } from \"../utils/types.ts\";\n\nconst css = await readFile(\"styles/index.css\", import.meta.url);\nconst HLJS_CSS_URL = \"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/highlight.js@11.8.0/styles/base16/solar-flare-light.css\";\n\nexport default function Head({ title, post }: {\n title: string;\n post?: BlogPost;\n}) {\n const description = post?.description ?? SITE_DESCRIPTION;\n const ogImage = new URL(\"/og-image.png\", BLOG_URL);\n ogImage.searchParams.append(\"title\", title);\n\n return (\n \n \n \n \n\n {title === \"Val Town Blog\" ? title : `${title} | Val Town Blog`}\n \n\n {/* RSS */}\n \n\n {/* Open Graph / Facebook */}\n \n \n \n \n\n \n\n {/* Twitter */}\n \n \n \n \n\n \n\n {\n /* Sitemap\n \n */\n }\n\n \n

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