Show HN: Sunrise Calendar: custom printed calendar with sun and moon info

2 points by elijahparker 164 days ago | 13 comments

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?

slig 164 days ago |

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!

beardyw 164 days ago | |

I do. And a carefully chosen art calendar is a new picture every month.

elijahparker 164 days ago | |

Wow, major oversight -- thanks!

https://sunrisecal.com/

elijahparker 164 days ago |

Link here: https://sunrisecal.com/

I forgot to add this to the original post...

gus_massa 163 days ago |

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.

elijahparker 163 days ago | |

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.

gus_massa 163 days ago | | |

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.