So, it’s 2020 and I still like to use a homepage. I don’t like to call it a portal either, but I think that term is actually newer.
Since 1996, I used Yahoo!, Excite, back to Yahoo, Google’s homepage that was quickly de-commissioned, back to Yahoo and then just Chrome. But Chrome with some recent tab images was just lacking to me.
So, I started making my own. Initially, I was going to have a simple page and work on styling to make it look like a futuristic UI that you see in movies. I looked into this for a bit, but then I remembered I do something similar for work where I build client sites to integrate with our system. It might’ve been fun, but I wouldn’t have learned anything new. So I stuck with an unstyled page for a little bit and used Yahoo’s APIs and query language, YQL. Of course, this was discontinued shortly after I got started.
So I scrapped that project and built my site using Vue JS. It was the first time working with Vue and I really enjoyed it, despite the frustrations of working with something new. I picked it partly because React seemed like overkill for what I was doing and Vue seemed simpler and there was something I liked about it from the ‘hello world’ tutorials I read.
Once I picked the framework, things came along pretty quickly. I made some services that would parse and display news feeds, weather and some articles from different APIs. And I made another service for XML/RSS feeds.
I never figured out what to call it, so it’s just called a sub-domain called launcher.
I have it pinned to Chrome so I start on a tab that:
- Uses the Unsplash API to rotate through some images I’ve saved.
- Uses a weather API to load weather for locations I’ve saved.
- Has links to sites I usually open in the morning.
- A Google search bar built into the page, that I’ve never ever used.
Then, I have other tabs on the page that load content for things I’m interested in like finance, cars, sports, technology and more. Most are newsfeeds, but I made a stock tracker like my old Yahoo page and keep a maintenance log for my vehicles.
It was all working great until the news API I use (NewsAPI) switched to a paid model, even for a site with hardly any use. So, I’ll have to convert my newsfeeds again, but for now I have a usable portal, I mean home page.