NovaMC Status
A live player counter for a Minecraft community that is not mine. The owner wanted it on a phone and running as a desktop wallpaper at the same time.
The ask
A server owner wanted to see his player count without opening the game. In 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. It is styled to look right at a phone width and at full desktop size.
The decision that mattered
No backend at all.
A status page that needs a server of its own to tell you whether a server is up has added one more thing that can break. And it will break on exactly the wrong day.
The detail that nearly got it wrong
The network runs behind a proxy, and a proxy will happily report a player list that is not the real one.
The number had to come from the right source, or the page would have been confidently and permanently wrong. That is worse than showing nothing.