Ah, see: this is what we used to have finger for! When I was in university, I had a little shell script than I ran when I logged in to the UNIX system that asked me where I was, what I was doing, how long I thought I’d be there, and if I wanted visitors. This would get written to my .plan. Then people could grep the list of users online, and see where I was, and if they wanted and I was cool with it, they could swing by.

I think extending FOAF, or coming up with some kind of lightweight XML DTD for sharing personal status would completely take off. Someone could even figure out a way to use a stripped-down Jabber client for it that does nothing but poll your friends’ status.

Surely there’s got to be some way to do this with RSS? Some little PHP script that could be run through PHP with Magpie that can give you a dashboard of your friends status?

Oh, and regarding your lazy web wish: I’ve actually done that with PHP. You can check out my post here: Instant personal intranet: just add water!.

Uses two scripts, one to get the directory, and one to output the file. I’ve ripped 37signals CSS for my own, and now all my plain-text gets the Web2.0 design treatment!

Well, there’s this little parano voice inside my head warning me against posting personal info on the web (however futile it might be).

Anyone has read “The Blue Nowhere” by Jefferey Deaver? A little outdated now, but I can’t keep out of my mind the idea that there might be out there a serial-killer hacker mining for my personal information. And then again, since the whole world revolves around me…

At a cubefarm where I used to work, we had a VoIP system which allowed people to set their ‘status’ when at their desks or in a meeting, lunch whatever. There was a manager who had 10 people reporting to him, and he never used to set his status..

Watching people trudge to his corner cube (perk?) to discover he wasn’t there about 5 times a day made me think we needed to install a convex mirror or perhaps a ‘The Doctor is In” flag just for him. Actually, I used to sit near him, so I would set his ‘away’ status for him - anyone could change another person’s status .. which was kinda weird but useful… cube community service? heh

I’d like a status page for my blog but I have better things to do with my time - work for example, and need to migrate away from my current blog engine .. and my hosting provider. hmm

We are adding something like this today/tomorrow in My Tickler File. It’s a list , sent once a week, of all of your reminders/ticklers in one email. This post does give me some ideas however. Perhaps we can offer that list via RSS. Or add information from other services in our email that are RSS-aware. Hum…any thoughts?

Solomon Folks

Oh..the email includes just the reminders/ticklers for the upcoming week.

We have the phone client at work where one can set his status. I have refused to set it. It’s always ‘available’. But I defy the MAN by trying to track my comings and goings whither to the bathroom or have a coffee.

I want one! It’d be a great way to procrastinate - I could keep updating my current mood, my current tune….

Actually, I do think it’s more or less inevitable. Everything’s heading towards a world where all info is out in the open - so maybe I just need an alternate persona? So my public self could be well-behaved, while my AP could be, well, not-so-well-behaved ;)

So, side poll - how many of you have more than one on-line personality? (Raises hand)

Neat idea, Merlin.

It would need to be lightweight and very natural to use (both editing and viewing). It’s a shame IM “Away” messages don’t allow for more customization. That seems like the perfect place to put such a thing.

I loved Leslie’s status page too.

Can’t a selection of blog widgets do the same thing? I have a bunch of stuff on mine, at andreakremer.com: recent Flickr posts, now-playing list pulled from iTunes, and a random Oblique Strategy each time you reload. Not that that has anything to do with my status, but I’d imagine there are status-y blog widgets (or that someone could code some up) that would allow for easy status updates without manual editing…

The Heidi FAQ is a famous long-running personal status page.

I actually take yours, Merlin, over any of the others. I’m guessing that you pick your own percentage busy-ness? Would be quite spiffy to create some sort of little Excel formula (or fancier) that one could use, with set criteria, to determing their busy-ness level.

Solomon, the mass email idea is a great one for the workplace setting. I question how much determining my level of busy-ness would stress me out more than anything (as a student).

Oh, and does anyone have an appropriate and real word for “busy-ness”? I’ve never known one.

Another idea for reading all your TXT files, no matter what directory they’re in. Make a local copy and just have it automatically sync to your web server. Always accessible, always editable (even if you don’t have a text editor you can edit and create files/folders on the fly through a browser). Zen.

http://www.blosxom.com/

I maintain the beginnings of one at GFMorris.net. As more and more of the things you discuss publish some kind of feed, aggregating these things for public consumption will become much easier. In fact, you’re now making me think of how I could do this better…

Personal Status

Damn you, Merlin Mann … now you have me thinking about how I can make GFMorris.net a better personal status page.  ‘Twould keep people up-to-date and probably let people not wonder where the hell I am when I disappear into something they&#...

Oh, and regarding your lazy web wish: I’ve actually done that with PHP. You can check out my post here

Holy crap, Andrew! That totally works!

http://www.43folders.com/txt/

You just completely made my day.

Awesome, Merlin, I’m glad I could help! I’m throwing everything into text files these days and formating it with Markdown. I dumped that script into my sandbox at work, and a whole bunch of people grabbed it.

Re: Markdown view of text files

I wrote a simple perl cgi script to do a similar thing a while back. It does not do a directory listing as does Andrew White’s PHP script. I use it to serve the static HTML on my site, since it’s much simpler to write them in markdown.

http://greg.vario.us/software/markdown.text

Answering Robert’s side poll, haven’t thought of actually having an AP (duh), but maybe it’s just a guy thing. But it’s official now, my AP will be Lauro, the nerdiest guy around. (as opposed to my real-life, glamourous persona). ;)

Ah, the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator page.

The major blogging packages have really not addressed the “About Me” page to any great extent. Picture what might be:- - Structured CV and Profile data in human and machine readable format. (vcard, hCard, FOAF, whatever) - Personal Identity Server using one of the low end SSO systems like SXIP, OpenID, LID, TypeKey. - Aggregated RSS for your activity on the web. Flickr, del.icio.us, plazes, last.fm, Amazon wishlist, other blogs, blogrolling.com, RSS subscription lists, etc etc. Custom services to things like IM status. - Aggregating in arbitrary plain text lists as described above or with a real database and web UI - Arms length contact me form that lets people leave a private message without exposing your email address

At the moment, weblogs are still just focussed on the personal publishing angle. We need to beef up the periphery and take them to the next stage. People are doing this ad hoc with sidebar applets, so it clearly should get baked into the core distributions. It’s also a natural for the big hosted systems like MSN Spaces.

One other similar need is the ability to automatically generate blog posts from blogs posted elsewhere on other systems. So if I post a blog on Ecademy or Tribe it should automatically appear in my home blog.

Lots of potential code here. Somebody pick it up!

Lazy Web: I wrote a simple python script that scanned a folder of textfiles looking for ‘todo paragraphs’ which was extracted and created an HTML files. The HTML page included links so I could open BBEdit and get it to jump to a certain todo item just by clicking a link in the web browser.

What would that be good for?

If you’re going to use Andrew’s script, please change markdown_file_results.php to read:

<?php include_once "markdown.php";

$filename = $_GET[theFile];

if preg_match(‘[^A-Za-z0-9.-_]’, $filename) { exit (“Invalid filename supplied”); }

$fp = fopen($filename, ‘r’); $my_text = fread($fp, filesize($filename)); fclose($fp); $my_html = Markdown($my_text); ?>

The original version could allow bad people to read files they shouldn’t. This is particularly important if you’re putting this up on the internet.

Props to Andrew for putting useful code in the world and saving us from having to do it ourselves. :)

I actually put user status on each user’s ChangeLog page (essentially a blog) on Bactroid.net, and it has been one of the most popular toys on the site. Users just write out a query and then from then on they can type an answer for that just by clicking the link to edit it. They can decide by means of a checkbox whether or not to post a given query this time.

You can see examples here and here.

I have done something similar on my website, with a Todo list only. But I am eger to try the whole shibam (not sure if this is the correct spelling). Also this might be off topic but I LOVE what you did to your site, it is alot easier to read now.

Nice, Andrew! I actually took your script and did a little bit of hacking on the index page to prettify the display of the directory of files. Namely, there are two changes, which really only work for the way I write/name textfiles:

• Assuming the files are named something like grouping_title.txt, you’ll get a nice header with a list of its associated files underneath. For example, going off the status idea, I have a status_party.txt, status_work.txt, etc. (I realize I am describing this very poorly. Here’s my status page as an example.)
• Display of filenames (again, really only works if you name them like I do) goes through a number of string functions to make the names more interesting looking - underscores become spaces, the first letter of the first word is capitalized, and so on.

Much obliged for kicking this off. Now I have something new to do. Oh, before I forget - source to my index.php.

Am I allowed to talk about the other 43* site? One of the features I like about http://43people.com is the feed aggregator. Mine at:

http://laurel.43people.com/feeds

It’s got upcoming, flickr, my blog, all my activity on the 43 sites, even a feed from the local public library of the books I have out.

WordPress has a custom fields thing where you can add the sort of fields you’d have in a status page. The WordPress codex has an example here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Custom_Fields

The only problem I have is that on individual pages where you use custom fields, it insists on putting an extra field of “_wp_page_template: default”, whether you want it to or not. I think they may be working on this, but I haven’t found a fix yet.

Here’s a quick ‘n dirty perl script to munge all your lists together, it sends it to STDOUT. It assumes that Markdown.pl is in your exec path:

catmark.txt

Most of this is from the Perl Cookbook. You can run it periodically and pipe it to a file to be included in your page if you want. Enjoy!

It’s 1.30 am here; made a mistake. The if line should read:

if (preg_match('/[^A-Za-z0-9._-]/', $filename) ) { exit ('Invalid filename supplied'); }

Previous incarnation not only broke completely, but failed to protect against the most common attack. :( Apologies for any consternation caused. :)

-s