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?

Phil Ulrich's picture

Nice, Andrew! I actually took...

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.

 
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