Devlog 2 of Situationboard

Things I’ve worked on since the last devlog:

• A simple favicon - just “SB” in the Inter font that’s used across the site
• An Oil Price widget. It originally used data from oilpriceapi.com however I realised that they didn’t provide a permanent free tier, so I switched to the US government’s (of course) EIA (Energy Information Administration) which updates less frequently (half a week or so?).
• Loading animation for catpic widget from Wikimedia Commons

Next up I’ll probably work on a description button in the Add Widgets dialog as it already has a widgets.json entry, its just unused.

Devlog #1 of SituationBoard

After finishing the hackpad project, I was trying to find new project ideas to do, so I asked my dad for a QoL improvement that could be made. He mentioned wanting a “portal” to have loads of different information widgets on one screen, as for a lot of things you need to go across different websites. Coincidentally, the Frictionless mission was running, whose “mission” you could say was exactly that - to make something that improves quality of life.

The name “SituationBoard” is a play on those “monitor the situation” dashboards that government officials or OSINT people use. The data on here as you can probably see by the screenshot is probably not of as high importance [citation needed].

I decided to make this in express.js, and plain HTML to keep it minimal. The backend will handle most widgets that need APIs, as those wih API keys shouldn’t be sent on the frontend because the keys will be leaked.

The first widget added is a random cat picture from a service called Cat-as-a-Service (cataas.com). This didn’t require the backend as cataas doesnt take credentials so it was a good first widget.

Next up I’ll write more widgets like weather, prices of various commodities like oil and holiday calendars, and add more features, potentially styling the website up along the way.