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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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At a cubefarm where I...

Submitted by Nick (not verified) on October 19, 2005 - 5:04am.

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