I put a new project online: rentalyieldcalculator.co.uk. It's a simple tool to help mortgage lenders, letting agents, landlords (or potential landlords!) calculate their annual rental yield.
There are many yield calculators online already but this one is mine :D and it's conveniently located at a memorable UK domain name.
This is the first single page application I've created. It's also the first form I've written which doesn't POST to a server. The auto-calculate functionality was implemented using the magnificent Hyperscript. It reminds me of Jinja in the best of ways. I love the readability - people constantly forget that programming languages are created for humans first, then computers. Despite being written only once, programs tend to be refactored many times over, so language readability counts!
I originally intended to write it in React, but the thought flashed into my head "I bet this'd be simpler and easier using Intercooler!" It turns out Intercooler has been superceded by HTMX and (as far as I can tell) those talented people went on to create Hyperscript.
This is now also the fourth website I've published using Netlify - it's just that fast and easy to use! The sites almost all work via different mechanisms:
- hugobaldwin.com and htbdevelopment.com are both Pelican static sites;
- a page predicting the best day/time to go swimming in Torquay - it's a Python script which calls weather and tidal APIs at buildtime then generates an HTML file;
- rental yield calculator - as described above, it's more or less a single page JS app.
I'm currently working on improving the search ranking of the site and also have a few other features planned.