(yes, I know it’s Thursday, work with me here)
Today’s World Wide Web Wednesday link is…
http://dashing.io/ – Dashing
I love data in any kind of form. You name it, I like it – numbers, gauges, meters, even plain ‘ol blinky lights. I will sit there and watch just about anything that provides information. To tell you how extreme I am about it, the electric company once installed a device to shut off my air conditioner during peak periods. I used to be able to seeit from my bed blinking on and off and on and off. When they came and removed it, I was highly, highly pissed they took my blinky light away.
Yes, I love taking in information. The only thing better than getting information is getting information from a device of your own making… or one that has been extensively manipulated by you.
Dashing is an open-source program written in Ruby that serves up web pages that can be dynamically update with a Java derivative. As the administrator of a couple of systems and the backup administrator of a couple more, I find it entertaining informative to see what those systems are doing in near real time. The installation is pretty easy provided all the proper packages are in place but the configuration can be a bit of a bear – my typical experience with most open-source software. While you don’t need to know much Ruby or Java to run things, a working knowledge of html is quite helpful if you want to make changes to the layout like I did. While you can configure the software to pull data, I preferred to push data via JSON by modifying some Python scripts I already had in place to send data elsewhere. While the main display is on a large screen television, I always keep a browser open to the main web page on my desk because, well, I can.
I’ve threatened to install a Dashing server at home to keep track of certain things like the calendar and weather, but it just never seems to get done. Have I mentioned that I have too many hobbies?
Dashing – it’s awesome. Now get out there and Web.