| title: | Talk of the Town, Feb '26 |
|---|---|
| description: | Valentine's Day, ATProto, & other vals we love |
| pubDate: | 2026-02-18:00:00.000Z |
| author: | Pete Millspaugh |
| thumbnail: | https://imagedelivery.net/iHX6Ovru0O7AjmyT5yZRoA/9451ad5d-2a82-488b-b5e6-b4101c448b00/public |
We're experimenting with a new Talk of the Town blog series to spotlight neat vals from the community and other goings-on in Val Town.
mewtru made an adorable valentine val—a val val—that over 10k people have remixed! That means to the ~20k people who signed up for Val Town in the last two weeks, we'll forever be the Valentine's Day company.
Val Town has made its way into the Atmosphere, as in the AT Protocol ecosystem (or "atproto," for short). Dan Abramov is running code on Val Town for his new Inlay "social component" system.
Dan will be presenting at ATmosphereConf 2026 in March, and Tom from our team might be there, too—let us know if you're going!
Paul Chin Jr. gave a Val Town demo at the NorfolkJS January 2026 meetup. We love Paul's description of Val Town: "a nice place for JavaScript." If you're throwing a val-centric local meetup or hackathon, let us know! We can order some pizza pies for you (or a Wegmans charcuterie board, in Paul's case).
There are far too many cool community vals to share since we last rounded them up (in June), so we curated a handful to kick off the year.
- Guy Dupont made a val to track laundry machines in his building using a tiny microphone, bluetooth microcontroller, and a Particle Tachyon computer
- Joey Hiller built a dc-hotspot-map val to track Helium Hotspot growth around Washington DC
- forresto created a moon-phase val that displays an image of the moon now, proxied from NASA's servers (live at moon.val.run)
- Trent launched his ReadBack app with its backend built entirely in Val Town!
- Ash Ryan wrote an index-now val that automates IndexNow submission for your websites (live on index-now.val.run)
- Jan Zheng put together a re-search val that search the web and academic sources with multilingual summaries (live on re-search.val.run)
- Caleb created an otp val that generates disposable emails and copies verification codes sent to them super fast with a Raycast shortcut
- Caleb also made a crxtotal val that scans Chrome extensions for viruses
- Simplescraper made extension-checker, another val that checks Chrome extensions for known threats (live at extensioncheck.val.run)
- Jono Yeong made a bluesky-cron val to trigger Netlify builds (and wrote about it!)
- dpip built a graphemeCounter to, you guessed it, count graphemes in text, including emojis and complex characters
- Nico Baier refactored his sqliteExplorerReact val (a userspace sqlite UI that preceded databases and a query interface for every val!)
- Nico Baier also made a chicago-resident-days val that scans Bluesky for free museum days in the upcoming week
- kamalnrf built a github-zip-api val to download any GitHub repo or subdirectory as a .zip for downloading Claude Skills
- kamalnrf also created a claude-plugins-registry for Claude Skills and Claude Code Plugins (live on claude-plugins.dev)
- yieldray wrote a honox-valtown-template val to use HonoX file-based routing and islands hydration deployed on Val Town
- Steve Olsen wrote a connect4_ai val using a WebGPU shader to play connect4 against a bot (live on connect4.val.run)
- Jim Nielsen built a Remix 3 fetch-router val
- tylersayshi wrote a little teapot val
- raymondcamden created a randomhorrormovie val to generate new horror movie titles using a Markov Chain
- Wil B vibe-coded a qbat puzzle game val with Bluesky integration (live on qbat.val.run)
- Jordan Mann built an ashby val to pull job listings from Ashby into your RSS feed
- James Keezer wrote a like-anything val (and blog post!)so you can put a like button anywhere
- Erick Christian built github-place to turn his GitHub profile into r/place
- neverstew made a spotifyPlaylister val to auto-download his last 20 liked Spotify songs
- cheersderek wrote a random-ghostbusters-quote val using SASS
- all built a valamp mp3 player val (live at valamp.val.run)
- pomdtr made a val-town-pages val as a sort of GitHub Pages in Val Town
- helge built a doodle val (live at doodle.val.run)
- Felix De Montis built jahreskalender (in German) to customize his calendar
- Steve created an auto-thread val to replace/improve upon Needle in Discord
- Steve made a pylon-support-bot val based on a bot built by one of our Teams customers
- Steve vibe-coded smallworld with Townie to sorts his Twitter friends by location so he can find friends to meet when traveling
- Steve created an atproto OAuth template val, ported over from @zeu.dev's deno template
- Steve made a rage-clicks val to forward "rageclicks" from Posthog to Discord so we can see where our UI is making users mad
- Tom updated his Bluesky ThinkUp Tribute val that tracks whenever someone you follow on Bluesky changes their bio
- Charlie made a riddle-diary val so that when you write, your diary writes back (live on riddle.val.run)
- Charlie built an stl-viewer that designs parts for a 3D printer with help from Townie
- Pete built a tld-wiki val to explore all 1,592 top-level domains and collect uses in the wild
Share your favorite vals (whether written by you, a friend, a coworker, or
Claude) in our Discord #showcase channel, and
we'll link to them in a future Talk of the Town edition!