OpenAltFinder changes in July, 2026

Now that the month of July is over, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on all the changes I've made last month.

There's a few reasons for doing this:

1. In the spirit of open-source, I also want to be more open about what's going on with OpenAltFinder
2. I'm forcing myself to write, with the goal to become better at it
3. SEO is a big problem for OpenAltFinder at the moment, so I'm also taking this chance to write out my thoughts behind these changes.

The commit log

51692cd 2026-07-31 Create deterministic keys for OG images
bd66182 2026-07-31 Update GitHistoryChart to reuse Modal component
36bfc66 2026-07-31 Cache OG images on R2
e5142f6 2026-07-30 Move /article to /articles Added articles link in sitemap
b10360a 2026-07-29 Add new sugestion modal
90a3243 2026-07-27 Update newsletter FROM email
b7846f2 2026-07-27 Correctly escape Listmonk template expressions Allow weekly-report to generate for a specific week by using ?year=xxxx&week=xx
b88861a 2026-07-26 Update on-site weekly report
0f9d761 2026-07-26 Fix trending tools in weekly report
ac0382c 2026-07-26 Update weekly report newsletter
5d5ffd3 2026-07-26 Updated newsletter template
ce98591 2026-07-25 Re-use generated data
88830b3 2026-07-25 Generate newsletter template
4739b06 2026-07-25 Updated weekly report
d44c5f9 2026-07-25 Initial weekly report version
147a1a5 2026-07-07 Remove unsupported zIndex

Weekly report

Quite a few of the commits were focused on building a weekly report, essentially a snapshot of the last week, published on both the website, and the newsletter.

Last weeks' report is availble on openaltfinder, and as an archived newsletter.

I've created a private API endpoint, that gets called from an cron schedule, the endpoint creates a snapshot of the data, and stores it as a JSON object, that way it's completely reproducible, in case I need it. Both the website and the newsletter template are constructed from the same JSON object.

Suggestion modal

On both the tools and software pages, there's a new modal window that let's users submit suggestions. Previously the only way was to use the dedicated submit page, but I wanted to make it easier for people to suggest changes.

Better caches for OpenGraph images

Previously generated OpenGraph images were simply cached by the browser, which just didn't make sense because many different services might request them. I finally ended up changed it, so that they're stored in CloudFlare R2. They contain a bit of metadata, which is a simple hash of the tools' title and description, when that changes, the image is regenerated and stored on R2 again.

Github stars image

Along with the previous changes, I also ended up building a Github stars image card. There is already a Github stars graph on the tools page, but I wanted to use this auto-generated image for blog posts, or any other type of content it might be used at.

Here's an example:

SEO

Not directly related to any of the changes listed above, but SEO has been a huge problem for OpenAltFinder. Initially I thought there was some traction, but we've now been completely de-indexed by both Google and Bing. Which in essence means we've been de-indexed by all other alternative search engines.

To this day I have no idea what went wrong, I've never really tried to game the system, or build excessive pSEO pages. But I'm hoping that through writing about it, someone with more authority on the subject matter might read it, and shed some light on what I'm doing wrong.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Search Console