Fifteen or sixteen years ago, before Pinterest was the de facto moodboarding platform and native applications ruled the lives of many a designer, I wanted a way to publicly curate beautiful things I’d found online and offline. With the help of some friends, I created a basic PHP loop (formerly nicethings.me) to watch a folder for images and meta data and display them on the front-end. The original repo is still available on GitHub, albeit with 10+ year old PHP and javascript for that nostalgia trip.

Around 2 years after I launched the site, I lost steam and shifted all of bookmarks to Pinterest. Pinterest is great, but with recent changes in the functionality of the platform I moved to Raindrop.io and began to reorganize all of my moodboards. Digging into the documentation and organization structure of Raindrop I realized the generous API provided me with the opportunity to reincarnate my old side project.

Files in Raindrop.io

Even as a former front-end developer, I’ve struggled building with APIs both in terms of efficiency and security. With the help of Claude Code, I quickly made sure the API was pulling in thumbnails and metadata for the grid view, that all the tokens were secure, and then shifted my focus to fine-tuning the rest of the details in browser. The result is a super simple, masonry grid of things I find beautiful.

Whereas the previous incarnation of Nice Things was time consuming (renaming and organization of images was essential), the new version is set-it-and-forget. I drag an image into a folder in Raindrop and it’ll appear on Nice Things right away.

Nice Things 2.0 is simple. I wanted an ad-free, personalized destination to quickly pop open, feel inspired, then get back to whatever I was doing. Images load in a random order and you can click a thumbnail to enlarge it and use the keyboard or mouse to navigate through images. It hits the nail on the head.

Go and take a look at Nice Things.