I wanted to make a birthday app because I had nothing to do on my birthday besides claim some freebies at restaurants and code. Originally, Birthed was an app to help you claim freebies on your birthday, help you track your friends' birthdays, and generally help you on your birthday to not be bored.

I posted this version and a few other versions before I open sourced the code and made it is what it is today. I got a lot of criticism on Reddit saying it was too privacy invasive and that people don't trust a website that looks vibe coded with their birthdays lol.

I thought it would be much more interesting to make an r/place inspired board, called "the Hive", where Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow are voted on with things like famous birthdays, famous events on that day, famous songs trending on that day, etc... Each day eventually seals at midnight Eastern at the end of the next day. The website/app is entirely bee themed as if it's your "bee day". The r/place mechanics and bees surprisingly have a lot of puns lol.

The catch is you only get three "buzzes" per day (today), and one more buzz for the day after (yesterdays board). You cannot camp the board like r/place, you pick three things that matter and you're done, and so is everyone else. It's more like Wordle in that way than r/place. The biggest tile on a sealed board is won by crowd majority, not just who can stay up the longest.

Please check out the website and click through a few days, specifically Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. You can also click random to surf the pages that way. There's no accounts, and your birthday stays in your browser only. There's no JavaScript on the date pages. A buzz is just a web form. You can turn JavaScript off and the site will still work.

Some facts come from Wikipedia, some from Gemini, some from a curated list I made like Minecraft, Fortnite, etc... I need recommendations for this part! Also, if the news outlets all cover a story, it shows once, as "bbc.com with npr.org and aljazeera.com". So buzzes aren't split among the different cards of the same story.

There are 366 date pages built ahead of time, served by a small Node server with no npm packages. Postgres on Supabase, and a there's a worker that runs every 15 minutes to pull news and update.

I'm open to all kinds of feedback on this project, positive or negative.

Today's "Hive": https://birthed.app/today/

Random Day: https://birthed.app/random/

How it Works: https://birthed.app/about/

Privacy Policy: https://birthed.app/privacy/