Ship #1

@aamosm on Obscure · about 3 hours ago

Obscure is a customizable new tab page built around search and discovery.

Right now it supports multiple search engines and displays NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, but that’s only the starting point.

The long-term goal is to let anyone create and share their own search engine. Whether it’s for a niche topic, a personal website, or a small community, Obscure aims to make discovering and using those search engines as simple as selecting them from a list while keeping the overall UI very minimal.

Current Main Features :
Search (Guide)
NASA API (Guide)
Implementation of different Search Engines

Features to Add:

More options for engine
Better categorization
Remove redundant engines that have shifted url (make more dynamic)
Add themes (with NASA SPACE being one of the themes)
Keyboard shortcuts
Better customization

Try project → See source code →

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@aamosm on Obscure · about 3 hours ago

15m 20s logged

Obscure - Devlog 2

Search is working

The new tab page now has a working search interface with support for multiple search engines. I’ll be adding more over time, especially community-made ones once that part of the project is ready.

NASA APOD

I also added NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day to the homepage.

At first I used the high-resolution images, but they took noticeably longer to load. I switched to the standard image instead, which makes the page feel much more responsive without losing much quality.

Small fixes

There were a few setup issues along the way too.

I fixed a GitHub Actions dependency problem and cleaned up a few things so deployments are a bit smoother.

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@aamosm on Obscure · about 4 hours ago

20m 37s logged

Obscure - Devlog 1

Getting started

I started by following the guide, but as usual I ended up taking it in my own direction.

For now, the project is a custom new tab page, but the long-term goal is much bigger. I want Obscure to support search engines created by other people, whether that’s YouTubers, fellow Stardance hackers or students.

The idea came from FaceDev’s video where he built his own internet protocol. It wasn’t meant to replace the web, but to create a much smaller network where people could host their own websites. I want to bring a similar idea to Obscure by making it easy to discover and search through community-made search engines.

Setting things up

This project also gave me a chance to work with GitHub’s deployment workflow instead of the hosting setup I normally use.

While setting everything up, I used a placeholder value for the API while wiring things together. Before adding the real key, I realised I’d forgotten to ignore the .env file. I fixed the .gitignore immediately, verified nothing sensitive had been committed, and only then added the actual credentials.

It was a small mistake, but a good reminder to check the repository before introducing any secrets.