Today on View
A single-page app that curates a small themed art gallery based on today's date —
holidays, seasons, or artist birth/death anniversaries — pulling artworks from the
Met Museum's Open Access API
and a short Wikipedia-sourced biography for each artist shown.
Features
- A single artwork at a time in a carousel — prev/next buttons, dot navigation, left/right arrow
keys, and touch swipe on mobile (
src/components/ArtworkCarousel.tsx).
- A free, no-account "Listen" button on each artist bio, read aloud via the browser's built-in
Web Speech API (
src/components/ReadAloudButton.tsx).
- An RSS feed at
/feed.xml (src/app/feed.xml/route.ts), auto-discoverable from the page <head>
and linked in the footer. Deliberately a single, daily-changing item — consistent with the rest of
the app, there's no archive of past days.
- Mobile-first responsive layout: substantially tighter spacing/type scale and a clamped bio excerpt
on small screens, full layout on desktop/tablet.
Stack
- Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript — the whole app is one server-rendered page.
- Tailwind CSS — styling.
- Met Museum Open Access API — no key required (
src/lib/met.ts).
- Wikipedia REST API — no key required (
src/lib/wikipedia.ts), one short bio per unique artist
shown that day.
- Hand-curated calendar —
src/lib/calendar.ts, ~30 entries (holidays + artist anniversaries).
- Wikidata fallback — for any day not in the calendar, a live Wikidata lookup (
src/lib/wikidata.ts)
finds painters born/died that day and cross-checks them against the Met, before finally falling back
to a seasonal theme. See "Gallery resolution order" below.
No database, no user accounts, no archive browsing, and no paid API dependency — the whole app is one
page that reflects "today," built entirely on free data sources.
Gallery resolution order
For any given date, src/lib/gallery.ts resolves today's theme in this order:
- Calendar — an exact hand-curated match in
src/lib/calendar.ts.
- Stash — a previously-found Wikidata match saved in
src/lib/calendar-stash.json (see below).
- Live Wikidata — looks up painters born/died today, tries each (ranked by notability) against the
Met until one has enough usable artworks.
- Season — a generic seasonal theme, the final fallback.
Any of these that comes up thin on Met results backfills the remainder from the season's query.
Getting started
npm install
npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000. No environment variables or API keys needed.
Extending the calendar
Add entries to the CALENDAR array in src/lib/calendar.ts:
{ id: "some-id", month: 3, day: 14, title: "Pi Day", blurb: "...", metQuery: "geometric pattern" }
metQuery is passed to the Met's /search endpoint. Set artistOrCulture: true to restrict the
search to the artist/culture field (better precision for artist names).- If a themed search returns fewer than 4 usable (public-domain, has-image) results, the gallery
automatically backfills with the current season's query.
Growing the calendar with the backfill script
scripts/backfill-calendar.ts is a standalone maintenance script — not run by the website — that
you run yourself whenever you feel like it, independent of what day it actually is:
npm run backfill-calendar # all 365 days, skips already-curated/stashed ones
npm run backfill-calendar -- --start=1 --end=31 # just January
npm run backfill-calendar -- --force # recheck days already in the stash
It loops over days of the year, looks each one up on Wikidata, and checks candidates against the Met.
Good matches are written to src/lib/calendar-stash.json immediately (so an interrupted run loses no
progress). Periodically review that file and promote the entries you like into the CALENDAR array in
src/lib/calendar.ts for a permanent, reviewed match.
Caching
The page is revalidated at most every 6 hours (export const revalidate in src/app/page.tsx), so a
burst of visitors doesn't hammer the Met/Wikidata/Wikipedia APIs — the gallery for the day is generated
once and served from cache until the next revalidation window.
Deploy on Vercel
vercel
No environment variables required.
