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Everybody needs a personal "status" page

Submitted by Merlin on October 19, 2005 - 2:59am.

Lots of sites have status pages. I wish more people had them.

  • My friend, Leslie, used to do an excellent one that included updates on her beverages, hair, and stress level
  • My pal, Jay, posts his monthly expenses and to-dos
  • I manually update a stripped-down status that shows roughly how busy I am

Yeah, status pages for people should be more popular, and I also wish they were a bit easier to make and maintain. It would be a nifty way to display information like:

  • current projects
  • number of unanswered inbox emails
  • iTunes/Last.fm “Now Playing”
  • Netflix queue
  • amount spent this month on lattes
  • current crush
  • current nemesis

I’ve long had a Lazy Web wish for a little perl script that could cat all the txt files in a directory into a Markdown-styled HTML page (that you could then skin with CSS).

That way you could maintain a bunch of easy lists and the script does all the building and posting automagically. You could fake this with a blogging tool, but I like the idea of having it all updated in the background.

Got a good personal status page? Seen one you liked? What would you post on yours? Have a fast trick for helping noobs make and post status points to the interweb? Care to pick up my Lazy Web gauntlet?

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Oh, and regarding your lazy...

Submitted by Andrew White (not verified) on October 19, 2005 - 3:26am.

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!