43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Everybody needs a personal "status" page

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?

Courtney's picture

I do dig Leslie's status...

I do dig Leslie's status page as well, it's simple and loads quickly.

The home page proper on My personal site is a bit of a status page of sorts. In the true nature of the term "Home Page", it's a bit of a starting point for anyone looking for info at a glance on me.

It has links to all my profiles on the socially-driven sites and my various blogs, with sidebars that contain my del.icio.us links, my history off of Dodgeball.com, my events on Upcoming.org, excerpts from my 43Things, and my recently played tracks from Last.fm.

Eh. You might as well check it out yourself to see. :)

 
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