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Comment by i_love_retros | Hacker News Reader

Curious why a celebration of HTML needed a full stack javascript framework?

A server is needed to calculate the sun's position from latitude + longitude + time, and then render the gradient. I could use HTML templating in some other language/framework, but I used Astro because that's what I'm familiar with and it's very easy to deploy to Cloudflare Pages.

it's beautiful. btw, could this be all done in client side js? didnt look at the implementation, probably server is used to resolve location?

(not author) from the source:

  const { latitude = "0", longitude = "0" } = Astro.locals.runtime.cf || {};

To do it client-side, you would probably have to call some less-reputable IP geolocation service, or settle for navigator.geolocation which has a permission popup

Depending on how "approximate" is acceptable, I've found that using timezone names can be a good proxy for location. As most users have their timezones set correctly it's more consistent and private than IP or GPS.

I've made a library for my own use cases that does this (https://github.com/mcteamster/virgo), but it's also pretty straightforward to parse the city/state name out of the timezone and look it up somewhere.

Astro is a great way to write HTML

I'm sure that's your totally unbiased opinion ;)

I was a fan of Astro long before I became a maintainer. That's why I joined!

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