Last night I realized I had completely forgotten how to use Heroku.

This was slightly scary, so I decided to write something basic in order to brush up. So, I wrote FrontPage, a page that displays a randomly-selected news headline of the day (using the New York Times API), and gets a new one every time the page is refreshed. So if you like me are not inclined to read the news daily (I remember a time before university when I used to be well-informed), you can just set this to be your default new tab/page, so every time you open up a new tab, you indulge in edification. At least that was the plan.

Someone on Hackathon Hackers (the Facebook group) posted about register.science giving out free “.science” domains. Some minutes later, “frontpageof.science” was born, and the web app now dedicatedly serves the Science section of NYT. It’s not perfect; it’s completely dependent on the JSON response I get from the API with minimal checking for not-relevant content. I plan to work on it… sometime.

It was fairly straightforward to write. In order to use Heroku though, I had to use Rack (in order to coerce Heroku to host a static webpage), and had to figure out how to solve the bane of my existence. Then I did some JSON parsing, added a bunch of <br>s, and I was good to go.

Edit (20th March, 2015) : FrontPage is now a Chrome Extension.

Enjoy.