Show HN: Sunrise Calendar: custom printed calendar with sun and moon info
Edit: link: https://sunrisecal.com/
This is a personal project that I've been working on very slowly now on the side for the past 5 years (yes, ridiculously long), using it for myself for a while and now finally have it ready to share to a wider audience. It's a web app for building printed wall calendars that include sun and moon info for each day, specific to the location you choose.
Rather than using accounts, each calendar gets its own unique URL by which it can be accessed. This way there are no accounts, no logging in, no tracking, etc. Everything is deleted 7 days after the last access, or if ordered, 18 months after the last access. There's no email list, no collecting/saving of email, etc. It's for creating and printing calendars; nothing else. This makes it free to try without worrying about getting harassed by remarketing...
I built it with nodejs and pdfkit for creating the calendar PDF that gets sent to the printer (lulu.com). I'm just using file storage of json documents to start with -- I know this is not ideal, but I started simple and lightweight and will fix things if/when needed. In the past I've been overly obsessed with using all the right tools and frameworks, but that can sometimes distract from the simple core goal, so for this I've intentionally taken a different approach (specifically since this is more of a "just for fun" project).
But I don't know -- adoption has been slow so far. Does anyone use printed calendars anymore? Just a heads up: there's no link to your project. >Does anyone use printed calendars anymore? Kurzgesagt promotes their printed calendar a lot, so I'd guess people still like them! I do. And a carefully chosen art calendar is a new picture every month. Wow, major oversight -- thanks! Link here: https://sunrisecal.com/ I forgot to add this to the original post... Can I customize the name of the months? [Hi from Argentina!] I didn't find a way to add the name of the day (like "Monday") at the top of each column. It would be nice to have a few preloaded holiday lists. I guess you can start with the countries you get paying costumers. Hola de los estados unidos! Good idea on customizing the names. That’s at least an easy way around translations for everything, although Spanish would be a good one to add anyway. It’s already supposed to get the country holidays automatically (it uses some free API I can’t recall atm), so I’m not sure what’s wrong there, but I’ll see if I can find out. I'm clicking on the map instead of using "use my "location". I'm not sure if that's important. I actually get the names of the months in Spanish. I'm not sure if it's an obscure browser setting or how the site detects it. It gets the country from the browser rather than the location, but maybe I should change that. I guess that makes sense with the month names since they’re coming from the js Date object. Are the weekday names in Spanish also then? What would you need the month/weekday names customization for? > What would you need the month/weekday names customization for? For me are fine. I thought in the printed were only available only in English and for some weird reason I was seeing the online version in Spanish. I still don't thrust javascript. One interesting cases, some people (I!!) have a strong opinion about "sePtiembre" vs "setiembre". For weekdays, perhaps a shorthand "L Ma Mi J V S D" instead of the full names. I have no strong opinion. (I recently saw "L M X J V S D", but I'm not sure it's usual somewhere.) For a calendar I think I prefer the full name. Interesting -- "setiembre" is new to me. Would 7° also then be "setima"? I don't have custom names yet, but I think full Spanish support should be working now (though only with newly created calendars, since the language is determined at the start). It use to be valid only "sePtimebre" until a few years ago. I can find the date, may be 2000+something. Now "setiembre" is also valid. It looks like it's popular in Peru, but sometimes it's used here too. (When I say it, the "P" is weak, probably closer to "seBtiembre", but it's there.) The tradition is Spanish is to keep the orthography synchronized with the oral form, so if some variant gets too popular it's included in the RAE dictionary and later if the old form is unused it's deprecated. It's very different from English, where the oral and written form of a word may be almost disjoint. > The tradition is Spanish is to keep the orthography synchronized with the oral form Interesting, I guess that makes sense. I love how phonetic Spanish is, but I hadn’t considered that it means the spelling needs to equally evolve with the language in order to stay that way. Thanks for all your replies — I probably won’t watch this thread indefinitely, but feel free to reach out at elijahparker at gmail