Ship #1

@nicholas1023 on My APOD New Tab · 8 days ago

I made a custom new tab which uses NASA's APOD API as the wallpaper which refreshes everyday. It allows you to select a search engine for your queries with just a click. For example, you could select Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo for daily searches and GitHub to search for repositories. You can also add frequently visited URLs to the pin section which will store them in localStorage. It looks much like a normal new tab page, but it aims for a simple and minimalistic page without clutters that built-in new tab pages have with automatically added bookmarks. One feature I'm proud of is the search engine selection dropdown. Most browsers only allow you to change that in their settings, but mine can be switched easily to fit the context of your search! You can try it out at https://nicholas1023.github.io/new-tab/!

Try project → See source code →

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@nicholas1023 on My APOD New Tab · 8 days ago

2h 23m 2s logged

Added URL Pin function to my new tab site!

What’s New

Added a function to pin your favourite URLs for easier access with localSotrage to ensure they stay even after reloads. Instead to showing the website’s name, it displays it’s favicon for a simpler UI.

Problems I’ve Faced

It took me quite a while to debug the localStorage function. It turned out that the issue was the parsing and storing URLs as an array.

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@nicholas1023 on My APOD New Tab · 10 days ago

3h 0m 21s logged

Finished the basic functions of my APOD new tab page!

What I’ve done in this devlog

Set up the API Key for APOD
Create the basic UI and functionality for the new tab page.

Problems I faced

My site was initially deploying via pages-build-and-deployment, which led to the API not working. After some time and many git commit --allow-empty -m "Trigger pages build", I finally found out what the problem was! I didn’t change it to build via GitHub Actions. After changing that, it worked quite well. Another problem I faced was the timezone difference with my country and APOD’s API. I received 500 errors when calling them. It worked in the end when i used yesterday’s date!

What’s next

I’ll be thinking of what other features I should add to my new tab page, and implement them in the next devlog!