The ask
A server owner wanted to see his player count without opening the game. Two places, really: glanceable on a phone, and readable as a desktop wallpaper on a second monitor.
What I built
One page. No build step, no backend, no framework. It reads two public status APIs straight from the browser and falls back from one to the other, and it is styled to look correct at both a phone width and a full desktop.
The decision that mattered
No backend at all. A status page that depends on a server of its own to tell you whether a server is up has added one more thing that can be down, and it will eventually be down at exactly the wrong moment.
The detail that nearly got it wrong
The network runs behind a proxy, and a proxy will happily advertise a player list that is not the real one. The number had to come from the correct source or the page would have been confidently, permanently wrong, which is worse than showing nothing.