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  "description": "Valentine's Day, ATProto, & other vals we love",
  "path": "/talk-of-the-town-feb-2026",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-18T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "We're experimenting with a new Talk of the Town blog series to spotlight neat\nvals from the community and other goings-on in Val Town.\n\nValentine's Day\n\nmewtru made an adorable\nvalentine val—a val val—that over\n10k people have remixed! That means to the ~20k people who signed up for Val\nTown in the last two weeks, we'll forever be the Valentine's Day company.\n\n\n\nVal Town in the Atmosphere\n\nVal Town has made its way into the\nAtmosphere, as in the AT\nProtocol ecosystem (or \"atproto,\" for short).\nDan Abramov is running code on Val Town\nfor his new Inlay\n\"social component\" system.\n\n\n\nDan will be presenting at\nATmosphereConf 2026 in March,\nand Tom from our team might be there, too—let us know if you're going!\n\nVal Town in your town\n\nPaul Chin Jr. gave a Val Town demo at the\nNorfolkJS January 2026 meetup. We love Paul's\ndescription of Val Town: \"a nice place for JavaScript.\" If you're throwing a\nval-centric local meetup or hackathon, let us know! We can order some pizza pies\nfor you (or a Wegmans charcuterie board, in Paul's case).\n\nVals we love\n\nThere are far too many cool community vals to share since we last rounded them\nup (in June), so we curated a handful to kick off the year.\n\n- Guy Dupont made a val to\n  track laundry machines in his building\n  using a tiny microphone, bluetooth microcontroller, and a Particle Tachyon\n  computer\n- Joey Hiller built a\n  dc-hotspot-map val to track\n  Helium Hotspot growth around Washington DC\n- forresto created a\n  moon-phase val that displays an\n  image of the moon now, proxied from NASA's servers (live at\n  moon.val.run)\n- Trent launched his\n  ReadBack app with its backend built entirely in\n  Val Town!\n- Ash Ryan wrote an\n  index-now val that automates\n  IndexNow submission for your websites (live on\n  index-now.val.run)\n- Jan Zheng put together a\n  re-search val that search the web\n  and academic sources with multilingual summaries (live on\n  re-search.val.run)\n- Caleb created an\n  otp val that generates disposable\n  emails and copies verification codes sent to them super fast with a Raycast\n  shortcut\n- Caleb also made a\n  crxtotal val that scans Chrome\n  extensions for viruses\n- Simplescraper made\n  extension-checker,\n  another val that checks Chrome extensions for known threats (live at\n  extensioncheck.val.run)\n- Jono Yeong made a\n  bluesky-cron val to trigger\n  Netlify builds (and\n  wrote about it!)\n- dpip built a\n  graphemeCounter to, you guessed\n  it, count graphemes in text, including emojis and complex characters\n- Nico Baier refactored his\n  sqliteExplorerReact val\n  (a userspace sqlite UI that preceded databases and a query interface for every\n  val!)\n- Nico Baier also made a\n  chicago-resident-days\n  val that scans Bluesky for free museum days in the upcoming week\n- kamalnrf built a\n  github-zip-api val to\n  download any GitHub repo or subdirectory as a .zip for downloading Claude\n  Skills\n- kamalnrf also created a\n  claude-plugins-registry\n  for Claude Skills and Claude Code Plugins (live on\n  claude-plugins.dev)\n- yieldray wrote a\n  honox-valtown-template\n  val to use HonoX file-based routing and islands hydration deployed on Val Town\n- Steve Olsen wrote a\n  connect4ai val using a WebGPU\n  shader to play connect4 against a bot (live on\n  connect4.val.run)\n- Jim Nielsen built a Remix 3\n  fetch-router val\n- tylersayshi wrote a little\n  teapot val\n- raymondcamden created a\n  randomhorrormovie\n  val to generate new horror movie titles using a Markov Chain\n- Wil B vibe-coded a\n  qbat puzzle game val with Bluesky\n  integration (live on qbat.val.run)\n- Jordan Mann built an\n  ashby val to pull job listings from\n  Ashby into your RSS feed\n- James Keezer wrote a\n  like-anything val (and\n  blog post!)so you can put a\n  like button anywhere\n- Erick Christian built\n  github-place to turn his GitHub\n  profile into r/place\n- neverstew made a\n  spotifyPlaylister val to\n  auto-download his last 20 liked Spotify songs\n- cheersderek wrote a\n  random-ghostbusters-quote\n  val using SASS\n- all built a\n  valamp mp3 player val (live at\n  valamp.val.run)\n- pomdtr made a\n  val-town-pages val as a sort\n  of GitHub Pages in Val Town\n- helge built a\n  doodle val (live at\n  doodle.val.run)\n- Felix De Montis built\n  jahreskalender (in\n  German) to customize his calendar\n- Steve created an\n  auto-thread val to\n  replace/improve upon Needle in Discord\n- Steve made a\n  pylon-support-bot val\n  based on a bot built by one of our Teams customers\n- Steve vibe-coded\n  smallworld with Townie to\n  sorts his Twitter friends by location so he can find friends to meet when\n  traveling\n- Steve created an\n  atproto OAuth template\n  val, ported over from @zeu.dev's deno template\n- Steve made a\n  rage-clicks val to forward\n  \"rageclicks\" from Posthog to Discord so we can see where our UI is making\n  users mad\n- Tom updated his\n  Bluesky ThinkUp Tribute\n  val that tracks whenever someone you follow on Bluesky changes their bio\n- Charlie made a\n  riddle-diary val so that when you\n  write, your diary writes back (live on\n  riddle.val.run)\n- Charlie built an\n  stl-viewer that\n  designs parts for a 3D printer with help from Townie\n- Pete built a\n  tld-wiki val to explore all\n  1,592 top-level domains and collect uses in the wild\n\nShare your favorite vals (whether written by you, a friend, a coworker, or\nClaude) in our Discord  channel, and\nwe'll link to them in a future Talk of the Town edition!",
  "title": "Talk of the Town — Feb 2026"
}