Camera, code, coffee

I love Bing's daily photo feature, but I don't use Bing. So I whipped up Tiny Page, a simple landing page written in PHP. The operative word being simple. The PHP script pulls the URL of the current Bing photo and its title out of a JSON file and fetches the current weather conditions from the wttr.in service. A dash of CSS styling helps to make the page look not too terrible. That's all there is to it. Wait, actually, the page also shows whatever link you specify as favorite.

Come to think of it, the page can also show a random line from a text file. I have a vocabulary list, and I use this featurette to memorize new words and phrases. It's not exactly a replacement for a proper flash card app, but I find it useful nonetheless.

Tiny Page acts as a landing page for my VPS instance, and I use it as the new tab page. This way, every time I open a new tab in the browser, I can gawk at a beautiful photo, check the weather outside without looking out of the window, and recollect a long-forgotten word or phrase. If that's not a quality-of-life improvement, I don't know what is.

If you decide to give Tiny Page a try, replace the default value of the $city variable in the index.php file with the name of the desired city. By default, the JSON URL automatically detects your region and fetches an appropriate photo. To override this, specify the desired region by editing the value of the $mkt variable, for example, en-US, de-DE, it-IT, and so on. To make Tiny Page display a random line from a text file, put the text file where index.php is, and specify the text file's name as the value of the $text_file variable.

If you have basic PHP coding skills, you can easily add more blocks to the page: take a look at the TEMPLATE section to see how it's done. And if you have ideas for improvement, please open an issue.