5 ms·

Panic-inspired: Round up of business dashboards

50 points by traskjd 17y ago

patio11 17y ago
I got so inspired by Panic's that I coded a status display up Wednesday night, but the hardware won't arrive until Sunday. It is so hacky I'm a mixture of proud and horrified. (I already have a dashboard, but thought it might be helpful to have something around the apartment for when I wasn't on the computer.) After the hardware arrives I'll take some pictures and put up a how-to on my blog. Don't expect Panic-level design chops or anything, but you'll be able to hack together your own in a few hours for cheap.
- traskjd 17y ago
  Look forward to seeing what you come up with Patrick :-) I was tossing up linking to your post about your online business dashboard but decided to go with pretty pictures for now as they're often a bit more inspiring. The Panic post was very inspiring - I can relate - I may have to build one myself and chronicle the process. If you could blog about your experiences I'm sure it would be helpful to many of us who are about to kick off a similar project ;-)
dfischer 17y ago
All of those dashboards are really sexy.
jzting 17y ago
last.fm has some cool systems as well: http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control i especially like the build status bears :)
nitrogen 17y ago
I want to make something like this for personal use. This has inspired me to move it up the queue a bit. I've still got back-end work to do in the mean time.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Im toying with proposing one here at work... But I suspect that conversation will end "hey, if you want to make it.." and there is no way I can make it as sexy as some of these :(
dotBen 17y ago
I'm toying with designing a hosted dashboard (aka Radiator) system - with standard plugins for pluggin in your GitHub, Piv Tracker, status etc. The idea is that you could pick modules you want, choose a theme/apply your own CSS and away you go. Probably as an open-source/hosted model. If anyone is interested in working on this as a side project with me let me know!
- mrduncan 17y ago
  Sounds neat, with a simple API for application specific metrics it could be really useful.
tibbon 17y ago
I would absolutely love a simply Ruby based way to easily get these together (simple dashboard framework) and pull together the data. Might have to work on that unless someone knows of one already.
- patio11 17y ago
  I don't know how much mileage you're going to get out of a framework to do it, since many of the bits of data will be coming from diverse sources. For example, mine draws from Rails database models and a few RSS feeds. If you want, I'll show you all of my code in the post this weekend about it (still waiting for the darn hardware to show up). It is inside of 200 lines. The RSS code is so trivial it practically writes itself -- Google [SimpleRSS ruby]. As soon as you've got RSS support you get a lot of things like, e.g., unread email counts from Gmail (or Gmail apps) for free.
  - tibbon 17y ago
    That would be great. I'd love to see what you're doing. I want to build a small dashboard for at home for personal things and I'd really like to get one up for my company as well. It would be really good for everyone to be able to 'see' when we are productive or not.

50 points by traskjd 17y ago

I got so inspired by Panic's that I coded a status display up Wednesday night, but the hardware won't arrive until Sunday. It is so hacky I'm a mixture of proud and horrified. (I already have a dashboard, but thought it might be helpful to have something around the apartment for when I wasn't on the computer.) After the hardware arrives I'll take some pictures and put up a how-to on my blog. Don't expect Panic-level design chops or anything, but you'll be able to hack together your own in a few hours for cheap.

traskjd 17y ago
Look forward to seeing what you come up with Patrick :-) I was tossing up linking to your post about your online business dashboard but decided to go with pretty pictures for now as they're often a bit more inspiring. The Panic post was very inspiring - I can relate - I may have to build one myself and chronicle the process. If you could blog about your experiences I'm sure it would be helpful to many of us who are about to kick off a similar project ;-)

dfischer 17y ago

All of those dashboards are really sexy.

jzting 17y ago

last.fm has some cool systems as well: http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control i especially like the build status bears :)

nitrogen 17y ago

I want to make something like this for personal use. This has inspired me to move it up the queue a bit. I've still got back-end work to do in the mean time.

ErrantX 17y ago
Im toying with proposing one here at work... But I suspect that conversation will end "hey, if you want to make it.." and there is no way I can make it as sexy as some of these :(

dotBen 17y ago

I'm toying with designing a hosted dashboard (aka Radiator) system - with standard plugins for pluggin in your GitHub, Piv Tracker, status etc. The idea is that you could pick modules you want, choose a theme/apply your own CSS and away you go. Probably as an open-source/hosted model. If anyone is interested in working on this as a side project with me let me know!

mrduncan 17y ago
Sounds neat, with a simple API for application specific metrics it could be really useful.

tibbon 17y ago

I would absolutely love a simply Ruby based way to easily get these together (simple dashboard framework) and pull together the data. Might have to work on that unless someone knows of one already.

patio11 17y ago
I don't know how much mileage you're going to get out of a framework to do it, since many of the bits of data will be coming from diverse sources. For example, mine draws from Rails database models and a few RSS feeds. If you want, I'll show you all of my code in the post this weekend about it (still waiting for the darn hardware to show up). It is inside of 200 lines. The RSS code is so trivial it practically writes itself -- Google [SimpleRSS ruby]. As soon as you've got RSS support you get a lot of things like, e.g., unread email counts from Gmail (or Gmail apps) for free.
- tibbon 17y ago
  That would be great. I'd love to see what you're doing. I want to build a small dashboard for at home for personal things and I'd really like to get one up for my company as well. It would be really good for everyone to be able to 'see' when we are productive or not.