Here’s a nifty little service from Zach: pass in a URL and it returns an image of the site’s icon.
Think of it as the indie web alternative to showing Twitter avatars.
Chris has set up a whole site dedicated to someone-else’s-server sites with links to resources and services (APIs), along with ideas of what you could build in this way.
Here’s one way to think about it: you can take your front-end skills and do things that typically only a back-end can do. You can write a JavaScript function that you run and receive a response from by hitting a URL. That’s sometimes also called Cloud Functions or Functions as a Service, which are perhaps better names, but just a part of the whole serverless thing.
When I’ve been helping Codebar students on their personal projects, everything goes great until some kind of server-side processing is needed. Nine times out of ten, that server-side processing simply doing something with the contents of a contact form. This looks like it could be a useful service to plug into little projects like that.