This Day in History

This was a pet project of mine and probably one of my favorites that I have worked on. Not just the end result, but the challenge in getting there.

I’m a huge fan of the history of Kentucky and could spend hours at a time scanning through old newspapers. I thought it would be interesting if each day, after reading the current paper, I could also take a look back at one from the same day in a random year in the past.

To do this I reverse engineered Newspapers.com and their non-public API in order to be able to programatically pull images from archived papers. I then set up a script that would automatically load a new one from a random year every morning. The use of the Leaflet mapping library allows you to zoom and pan the image to help make it more readable.