I like to do something similar for computer-related stuff--go back to the basic, foundational sources. Bash, sed, AWK, and grep. Text files written in vim. I use mutt to read email on my laptop and now find myself idly wondering if I could do the same with fetchmail/sendmail and mailx. Lowest-common denominator computing. Of course, this sometimes complexifies things that could be simple. But to be honest, I *like* spending hours figuring out how to write a shell script that hammers RSS feeds into text, even though I know newsboat does it better. For me, though, it's ad fontes--going to the source--even if it's not the most efficient way.
And just for the heck of it, here's the code for the web server: