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?

The Bangus Supremacy » Here We Go's picture

[...] - the del.icio.us sideblog...

[...] - the del.icio.us sideblog - a nice tag cloud/index - a status page (everyone needs a good status page) - a panel for recent comments - a photo or two in the about page (no photos in the about page creeps people out, says Jakob Nielsen) - gravatar support in the comments section - upgrade the creative commons license - a better archive - something like kottke’s “further afield” by emer | posted in General Trackback URL | Comment RSS Feed Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links [...]

 
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