tou.gg: the front door, and why it was rebuilt

tou means to you. gg means given gladly. Everything I build is pointed at somebody: a student in Namangan, a welder pricing a grille, a guest at a wedding with a phone full of photos. Not at a category.

Why a three-letter domain

I already had maqsudjon.com. It is a good lab and a bad front door: a long name, tied to one person's spelling. I wanted a shape that does not pin the work to one country or one product, so that a course, a tool or a stream can all live under it while the root still means the person. I wrote about that in Why a three-letter .gg.

The first version

tou.gg went live on 19 September 2026. The first version was dark, set in monospace with an orange "weld" accent, and generated by a zero-dependency Node script into four full URL trees: English, Uzbek, Russian and Chinese. Its build refused to finish if any text was missing in any language. It was careful and correct.

It was also mostly text. Rows and rows of it.

Why it changed

On 14 October 2026 I rebuilt it around one idea: a visitor should be able to understand the work without reading a paragraph.

• Pictures first. Every project appears as a screenshot of the real, live site, taken the same day.
• Numbers that move. At the top, a counter ticks every second: the seconds since my first public repository, on 28 February 2025.
• Numbers that are checked. The counts (18 live sites, 191 public repositories, 3,146 commits, 14 domains) were taken from GitHub and from the Cloudflare account that runs the domains, on the day of the rebuild.
• Long notes behind every card. Each project now has a note like this one that explains what it does, how it was built and what went wrong, for anyone who wants to read.

Under the hood

It is still a static site on GitHub Pages, now built by a small Python script. The notes are written in plain text with a little Markdown and turned into pages, an RSS feed, a sitemap and structured data for search engines. Visits are counted by GoatCounter, without cookies. The old design is not deleted: it is kept in its own branch in the repository.

One thing was lost: for now the site is English only. The old Uzbek, Russian and Chinese addresses redirect to the English pages instead of breaking.

You are reading it. Back to the front page.