Agendra: What I'm going to do today

This is a simple web app that I use to remind myself what I mean to do today. I don't expect it to be useful to anyone else, because it's tailored to my own specific journal format. But hey, maybe you're looking for an example of a simple functional application that uses Node and Express (for web stuff), Mocha and Zombie (for headless browser testing), Dropbox (for storage), and Babel (for ECMAScript 6 and 7 language features). It's your lucky day!

Background (i.e., why?)

I keep a nightly journal in Markdown format, and I store it in Dropbox so it's available on all my devices. At some point I started including a "What about tomorrow?" section to help me plan, which was nice, except that sometimes it just meant that at the end of the next day I looked at it and thought, "Ohhhh, that's what I was supposed to do today!"

"Wouldn't it be better," I thought, "if that little agenda was the first thing I saw when I looked at my phone or tablet in the morning?" There are lots of dedicated apps that are all about daily planning, but what I wanted was something that would help me out without making me change my habits at all. I've got a journaling practice that works for the first time in my life, and I don't want to mess with it. And besides, I'm a professional web application developer; how hard could it be?

The plan I came up with: Build a simple web app that pulls the agenda section out of my latest journal entry and renders it as HTML, and use Meta Widget to display it on my Android home screen.

Setup

If, for whatever reason, you want to try this out for yourself:

1. Have a journal. Store the journal in a Dropbox folder, in Markdown format, in files named YYYY-MM-DD.md. In each file, have a first-level header with the word "tomorrow" in it, followed by a bullet list of things to do. If anyone ever asks, I'll put up an example.
2. Be a Dropbox developer. This app relies mostly on security through obscurity: I use my Dropbox key to get access to my Dropbox account, and host the app somewhere I haven't told you about. You'll need to do that too. Create a Core API app, authorized to access text files in all folders, and generate your own access token in the App Console.
3. Clone this repository.
4. Configure your repo using dotenv. First copy the file .env.example to .env, then edit .env to insert your own access token and the path to your journal folder (relative to the Dropbox root).
5. Have Node.js. (On OS X, brew install node.)
6. Install node packages: npm install
7. Try it out, I guess? npm start and then go to http://localhost:3000/.
8. Put it on Heroku or somewhere. Use environment variables in your hosting environment (e.g., heroku config:set) to do the configuration found in .env.

Development?

If you want to do anything with this code, go ahead; it's available under the free and open ISC license.

I recommend ESLint; the repo has a configuration file that should work.

The tests run against a live Dropbox folder. I use one Dropbox app for development and "production," and a separate one for testing. (The testing app only has access to its own folder.) If you want to do this too, put your test configuration in .env.test. Settings in .env.test override .env when testing.

The tests expect that Dropbox folder to contain some specific files. Again, if anyone ever asks, I'll make a version of those files available.