Devlog 8 of Situationboard

In this devlog I put the website on my VPS at https://situationboard.nouxinf.net/ and wrote a README. The readme contains some info on the project, screenshots, and instructions on how to add a new widget to the site for contributors.

Devlog 7 of Situationboard

In this devlog I added a dark mode that saves your preferences but also loads them from your system settings. I made a bunch of CSS tweaks at the same time to make it look a bit nicer too.

Devlog 6 of Situationboard

In this devlog I added a MacOS style menu bar at the top for some buttons. The SB icon and the Situationboard spans just refresh the page, the attribution button opens a dialog with credits to open source libraries and images used (APIs are credited separately in the add widgets screen). The about screen also has info.

Next up is just dark mode, some docs + readme then I’m ready to ship

Devlog 5 of Situationboard

In this devlog I added an XKCD widget, which fetches the latest XKCD comic through a proxy on the backend, and you can navigate through comics with the previous, next, random and custom number buttons. You can also click on the image to zoom in on the comic and the caption.

What I’m adding next is dark mode and an attribution screen to give credit to all sources used.

Devlog 4 of Situationboard

In this devlog I finished the weather widget. I added icons that I reused from an earlier stardance project, weatherstation that map to WMO codes, and it shows a forecast with min-max temperatures for the next 7 days.

Next up I’ll do an xkcd widget and dark mode

Devlog 3 of Situationboard

Things I added:

• A live time widget
• A description window for each widget that uses a markdown renderer
• A customisable weather widget (currently only shows temperature and location but will be updated with week-ahead forecast)
  Things I might add soon:
• dark mode
• xkcd widget?

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.