Bodging a browser dashboard displaying NiceChord's NiceIdea tips

The meaning of the word ‘bodge’ here is not in its colloquial sense, but rather what as described in Tom Scott’s The Art of the Bodge.

Background#

So, Wiwi Kuan’s NiceChord released a random musical idea generator, aptly named NiceIdea, in 2021. This generator is mainly written in JavaScript, and its source code can be found here.

This generator comes in two versions: an online version, and a CLI version for those who are into it. Personally, I really like this generator as it does help me a lot what is usually called ‘composer’s block’. Among the features provided in the generator, I particularly like the one that randomly generates a handy tip related to music in general.

However, being as lazy as I am, I sometimes find having to type the URL first¹ every time I want to use the idea generator quite troublesome. So, I started to think if there’s a way to implement a local version of it where the tips could be shown as I do routine stuff on my laptop, like logging into my desktop or opening a browser.

Initially, I planned to bodge up a desktop widget that seeks to achieve this, but then I realised it might be too difficult of a bodge to me, so I decided to make a browser dashboard (a.k.a. a New Tab page) version of it instead, something like Momentum Dash.

My plan is that I want the browser dashboard to behave such that it shows a random musical tip every time I open my browser.

Process#

These are my rough steps in doing the bodge.

First, I took the code from NiceIdea as well as Tabliss, a free and open source browser dashboard (which is also great to use and has multiple useful features). Tabliss is mostly written in TypeScript whereas NiceIdea is mainly written in JavaScript, so I reckoned it might not be too much of a hassle to incorporate them together.

Luckily, Tabliss has already had a pretty well-built quotes display feature. So, it seems like all I need to do is to just add a new list of quotes with the NiceIdea tips into the Tabliss codebase.

Outcome#

After several hours, I’ve completed the work. This is how it turned out.