A custom homepage with AJAX comics & weather
This mini-project was primarily to save myself time. I have wanted a custom “dashboard” for my homepage in my browser for quite some time. Today was the day that I created it. The main features are:
- DuckDuckGo Embedded Search Bar
- AJAX loaded XKCD Comic of the Day
- AJAX loaded, custom-designed weather forecasts
- Quick Links to my frequently visited websites
I built the project as a NodeJS Express App which fetches weather data from the DarkSky API and the latest XKCD Comic and passes them to the front-end in a single request.
I used the backend to fetch the data so I could implement node-cache
(similar to memcached) to reduce the number of API requests to DarkSky.
It also allowed me to create a config.js file which contains a simple
JSON configuration with API keys, coordinates for weather forecasts, and
link information to generate the navbar.
The homepage is live at https://start.zuern.ca, and code available on GitLab
