A custom iPad display on my desk
Hey friends! It’s been a few weeks since I sent a newsletter — been wrapping up the school year (done with finals on Wednesday though!)
Still, I should probably stop putting off writing this newsletter and send a couple tidbits. Here goes:
Ben Forms
I wanted to create a “Ask for Help” form for an app I’m building for JumboCode, but then I got excited about building a general-purpose forms website for myself to use.
So I built “Ben Forms” (demo video here), a silly little website that hosts forms that I can configure — like a contact form for me at forms.ben.page.
iPad display
I moved back home and received a 2013 iPad my uncle didn’t have a use for anymore.
So I turned it into an always-on display on my desk that constantly shows my next-up task from War Room. To get that done I actually had to open up API access on War Room so I could use integrate with it myself, which was quite easy using Laravel Sanctum — love Laravel.
The jury’s still out on whether this is useful, since I haven’t done a ton of work at my desk in the past week, but I kinda like the constant reminder of the next thing I should ideally be working on.
Another Notion API wrapper
I’m working on another Notion API wrapper, tiny-notion-api.
The thing is that Notion has a really good API, but transforming their proprietary output into HTML for a website takes a good amount of munging. I’ve always wanted to consolidate that work into one place so I can reuse it, which I’ve now done a few times.
This time I’m planning on using it to publish a new blog at ben.page (yes, I’m aware that I just refreshed it two months ago), where I can publish to my blog by writing in Notion. Despite the haters, I’m still quite excited about it and have a work-in-progress design up if you want to take a peek: ben-page6.vercel.app. (That 6 in the URL does unfortunately mean that there have been 6 iterations of a website at ben.page since I bought the domain in November.)
That’s all for me for now! Hope you’re doing well.
Enjoy your week,
Ben