6 ms·

Show HN: Dashku - a real-time dashboard app, built with SocketStream

109 points by paulbjensen 14y ago

lyime 14y ago
14 minute video? Why? On the homepage have a video that is 30-60 seconds. here is an example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcZjtGS1CE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcZjtGS1CE Otherwise looks good.
- sgrove 14y ago
  I hadn't seen that before, and I've sent a batch of photos. Really well done!
silverlight 14y ago
Is this always going to be free? Because there are other competitors in this space currently with premium solutions...
- paulbjensen 14y ago
  Hi, For the beta, yes, which should last a couple of months. I will investigate turning it into a SaaS, but for now I will go and find some work.
aquark 14y ago
Looks interesting. I looked at Geckoboard a while ago but gave up since the dashboards didn't offer the flexibility I needed at the time, and they were just too slow to render (I don't have a dedicated screen, just want to it the page often). One issue: I tried to sign up using Chrome 20 (Windows 7) and the dialog that appears is below the video in the Z-order.
- njx 14y ago
  I am the developer of InfoCaptor and would be pleased if you can take a look at https://my.infocaptor.com https://my.infocaptor.com
  - sudonim 14y ago
    My suggestion, is that if you're going to build a product for a tech audience, and you use bootstrap (which is a great idea btw), spend some time to make it not look like every other bootstrap site. I'm looking at you black fixed global nav bar.
    - njx 14y ago
      the actual app is not based on bootstrap. just the website is bootstrap which is like godsend. it is only couple weeks since i released it publicly and i am not done launching. But I absolutely hear your suggestion that website needs lot of work.
  - toddmorey 14y ago
    Also, talk about the three Zeros instead in the three Zs. 'ZZZ' means asleep or bored.
    - njx 14y ago
      ha ha, i didn't realize "ZZZ" would imply that :) will have to check some click through stats on that "ZZZ"
  - aquark 14y ago
    Looks very feature rich ... but to be honest the aesthetics need work. A huge part of this space relates to appearance obviously and the sample dashboards just don't look as polished as the competitors, even if they offer more widgets and options.
    - njx 14y ago
      thanks, i know need to work on getting more polished dashboards. It just taking time to churn everything out.
- heyitsnick 14y ago
  (tangent) I've got a feeling this is a bug in Chrome; z-order is not respected in some embedded <object>s. I've had this problem with sites that i've developed and haven't found a solution.
Xion 14y ago
The self-signed SSL certificate causes Firefox to scream security issue. You might want to fix that.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  Odd, Firefox here seeing a signed GlobalSign nv-sa certificate that it's got no problems with. Maybe just a rapid fix by the dev :)
  - jeremyis 14y ago
    Still had an exception here :/
jaryd 14y ago
The youtube video was blocking the sign up form for me -- I had to remove that div in "Inspect Element" before I could make an account...
hsuresh 14y ago
I see nothing but a link to self. Did something break?
sudonim 14y ago
Site seems to be having problems. Suggestion to the OP (your page also seems to be down) is to link to a static site with a demo video or description of the product. Or, test the load your app can handle before posting here.
SingAlong 14y ago
The app's assets (main.js and main.css) aren't being served properly. So right now I can only see a link to self on the homepage.
carlsednaoui 14y ago
Getting this error: Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory '/root/apps/status/client/static/assets/main/1340976517230.html' at Object.openSync (fs.js:240:18) at Object.readFileSync (fs.js:128:15) at ServerResponse.<anonymous> (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/lib/client/http.js:34:26) at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/root/apps/status/app.coffee:48:16) at EventEmitter.emit (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/eventemitter2/lib/eventemitter2.js:319:22) at Router.route (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/lib/http/router.js:18:15) at Object.handle (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/lib/http/index.js:96:54) at next (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/connect/lib/proto.js:190:15) at /root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:299:9 at /root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:322:9
- anemic 14y ago
  I hope the /root/ refers to the site's root directory and not root user's home directory. At least this confirms that it's actually running socketstream...
  - wavephorm 14y ago
    Probably not a good idea to run NodeJS as root.
    - dedward 14y ago
      Why not... It's an age-old concept, one I've enforced over decades, but seriously..... nowadays, once you are in, you are in, and systems (at least the ones I've put together in recent yeras, I can only assume the same of others) are very regularly refreshed from scratch from servers that can't be reached from the public facing stuff. (so even if you manage to find that one old php server and find some bug and drop some php thingy on it, it's going to get squished in 30 seconds, give or take, as regular housekeeping takes place. If you managed to actually focus on the attack and go deeper, it might take longer -but root or no root, the damage you can do is the same either way, and limited hte same either way. EDIT: For the record - I still follow this practice, I'm just debating it's relevance these days. Things change, right?
foobarto 14y ago
The title remembers me on http://beautifulmind.io/ http://beautifulmind.io/ which was on HN some days ago
- clickclack 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4164025 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4164025
paulbjensen 14y ago
Hi everyone, My apologies, I didn't expect to end up Top of HN. I'll try and get it back up. In the meantime, here is the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxf8f9AQBgM&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxf8f9AQBgM&feature=plcp
- dcosson 14y ago
  Thanks for posting, I'll have to come back later and check out the site. From the video I can't really tell if it's opensource or a hosted service. I'm also curious if there's an easy code import/export feature for individual widgets and/or the entire dashboard (all widgets, global styling, settings, etc). I don't think I'd use it for anything serious without being able to export the entire dashboard page and add it to my git repo (and being able to reload it if somethings gets lost or messed up). And being able to import/export individual widgets would make it easy for the community to share custom widgets so that in practice end users wouldn't actually have to write much code. Anyway, it looks like a cool project! EDIT: I see now there are REST api endpoints for creating & getting a dashboard, awesome.
- paulbjensen 14y ago
  Hi everyone, Once again, my apologies for the downtime. For some reason, this was the case: $ ulimit -n > 1024 I thought I had set the ulimit to unlimited, but that wasn't so. The site is alive, but may still be intermittent. Will keep you updated.
  - ffk 14y ago
    Did you set the limit on the CLI or within your limits.conf file? limits.conf is how you persist the value between reboots.
    - paulbjensen 14y ago
      CLI (facepalm). Thanks for the tip.
      - 14y ago
al_james 14y ago
Seen a couple of startup's sites go down when they make the HN homepage lately, and both seem to be using node.js (according to the error messages). Not dissing node.js, but maybe its the wrong tool for the job.. Just use a static site for your landing page!
DavidPP 14y ago
I have tried most of those dashboard services and the best one by far for me is http://klipfolio.com/ http://klipfolio.com/
kno 14y ago
https://dashku.com/ https://dashku.com/ is not working for me.
hicham 14y ago
website is down
pkhamre 14y ago
Put Varnish in front of it, quick!
- dedward 14y ago
  Would that, without any configuration, actually fix this?
sidcool1234 14y ago
Not loading for me.
codebeaker 14y ago
Website is still down, that's a shame - OP can't even get the homepage back online before showing HN. 30 minutes to bring back a homepage is pretty bad man, also your personal homepage http://paulbjensen.co.uk http://paulbjensen.co.uk is returning NO CONTENT, is that on the same (bricked) server?
- paulbjensen 14y ago
  Hi, Apologies for the downtime. It turns out ulimit was set to 1024 when I thought I'd configured it to unlimited. As for paulbjensen.co.uk, I removed that site about 3 months ago but didn't remove the link to it in HN. As for your question about the same bricked server, the answer is no, I run Dashku on a different server to the server that was hosting paulbjensen.co.uk.
jeromegn 14y ago
This is great. I really like how you can test your widgets with sample data. Because of the lack of a decent dashboard solution, we've been running our own. We absolutely wanted to use D3 and we wanted to have multiple, toggleable pages. This might just do the trick.
sidcool1234 14y ago
Independent of what it does and all, you have designed the UI really good. Kudos for that.
covati 14y ago
So this is free for now, what are you thinking of charging?
jabo 14y ago
You shouldn't be serving your static landing pages and assets over node.js. Ideally you should have an nginx server reverse proxy dynamic requests to your node.js server. Nginx should serve the static assets before the requests hit the node server.
- KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
  You have some data to back up this recommendation?
  - dedward 14y ago
    Indeed. I mean, it may very well be true, and without time to analyze, if you are highly confident in nginx and the rest of your server setup (it's not some other user definiable limit) you might as well. That said - building websites to handle load has no magic bullet. Sure, nginx is good. Far-future expires headers and cache-busting schemes to go with it are good too. CDN's are good. Varnish is good. Clusters are great too, for capacity and redundancy, but you need to be aware of stuff in all these cases, and every layer you add is also something else to manage and something else to break..... so really it has to come from test-driven results regarldess, so you are spot on. My beef with services like this (granted I haven't investigated fully) is I don't want hosted stuff. I get that's a huge market, but for confidentiality and other reasons, there is also a market for slightly more traditional stuff. I'd love a toolkit to make it easy to build arbitrary animated control panel-y things a-la Quest Spotlight on <whatever> for my apps... havent' found it yet, anyone know one?
jonny_eh 14y ago
This looks very slick, kudos! Small nitpick: why do I need to give myself a username when signing up?
lucian1900 14y ago
Much of the text in the page is not visible, and the layout is broken. Chrome 20 on Ubuntu 12.04.
masukomi 14y ago
demo page doesn't work in Chrome. Map doesn't do anything. updating text is in a thin column down the left side that scrolls off below the main image.
Cieplak 14y ago
(Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap)
nathanhammond 14y ago
Here is a little piece of a script I wrote to push the limits up on an Ubuntu box during setup (AWS). # Increase File Descriptor limits. export FILEMAX=`sysctl -n fs.file-max` sudo mv /etc/security/limits.conf /etc/security/limits.conf.bak sudo touch /etc/security/limits.conf sudo chmod 666 /etc/security/limits.conf echo "root soft nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf echo "root hard nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf echo "* soft nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf echo "* hard nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf sudo chmod 644 /etc/security/limits.conf touch /home/ubuntu/.bash_profile echo "ulimit -n $FILEMAX" >> /home/ubuntu/.bash_profile # Increase Ephemeral Ports. sudo chmod 666 /etc/sysctl.conf echo "net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535" >> /etc/sysctl.conf sudo chmod 644 /etc/sysctl.conf
- dedward 14y ago
  You know it's odd. One one hand, the almost-greybeard in me wants people to stop screwing around with what I take to be standard unix concepts... what are the ephemeral ports, etc. On the other hand, when I take a close look at something like what you just posted, the level of control is hard to argue with - nothing wrong with that. The temptation is still to basically do what you did (thanks BTW) and just revert everything back to what it rightfully should be.... it served us just fine for ages. Or I'll switch to FreeBSD ,unless they're doing the same thing.
hegga 14y ago
thank you for this! just created a awesome dashboard very quick! :) why not create a kickstarter project and raise enough money so you can open source the code? i would definitely contribute!

109 points by paulbjensen 14y ago

lyime 14y ago

14 minute video? Why? On the homepage have a video that is 30-60 seconds. here is an example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcZjtGS1CE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcZjtGS1CE Otherwise looks good.

sgrove 14y ago
I hadn't seen that before, and I've sent a batch of photos. Really well done!

silverlight 14y ago

Is this always going to be free? Because there are other competitors in this space currently with premium solutions...

paulbjensen 14y ago
Hi, For the beta, yes, which should last a couple of months. I will investigate turning it into a SaaS, but for now I will go and find some work.

aquark 14y ago

Looks interesting. I looked at Geckoboard a while ago but gave up since the dashboards didn't offer the flexibility I needed at the time, and they were just too slow to render (I don't have a dedicated screen, just want to it the page often). One issue: I tried to sign up using Chrome 20 (Windows 7) and the dialog that appears is below the video in the Z-order.

njx 14y ago
I am the developer of InfoCaptor and would be pleased if you can take a look at https://my.infocaptor.com https://my.infocaptor.com
- sudonim 14y ago
  My suggestion, is that if you're going to build a product for a tech audience, and you use bootstrap (which is a great idea btw), spend some time to make it not look like every other bootstrap site. I'm looking at you black fixed global nav bar.
  - njx 14y ago
    the actual app is not based on bootstrap. just the website is bootstrap which is like godsend. it is only couple weeks since i released it publicly and i am not done launching. But I absolutely hear your suggestion that website needs lot of work.
- toddmorey 14y ago
  Also, talk about the three Zeros instead in the three Zs. 'ZZZ' means asleep or bored.
  - njx 14y ago
    ha ha, i didn't realize "ZZZ" would imply that :) will have to check some click through stats on that "ZZZ"
- aquark 14y ago
  Looks very feature rich ... but to be honest the aesthetics need work. A huge part of this space relates to appearance obviously and the sample dashboards just don't look as polished as the competitors, even if they offer more widgets and options.
  - njx 14y ago
    thanks, i know need to work on getting more polished dashboards. It just taking time to churn everything out.
heyitsnick 14y ago
(tangent) I've got a feeling this is a bug in Chrome; z-order is not respected in some embedded <object>s. I've had this problem with sites that i've developed and haven't found a solution.

Xion 14y ago

The self-signed SSL certificate causes Firefox to scream security issue. You might want to fix that.

EwanToo 14y ago
Odd, Firefox here seeing a signed GlobalSign nv-sa certificate that it's got no problems with. Maybe just a rapid fix by the dev :)
- jeremyis 14y ago
  Still had an exception here :/

jaryd 14y ago

The youtube video was blocking the sign up form for me -- I had to remove that div in "Inspect Element" before I could make an account...

hsuresh 14y ago

I see nothing but a link to self. Did something break?

sudonim 14y ago

Site seems to be having problems. Suggestion to the OP (your page also seems to be down) is to link to a static site with a demo video or description of the product. Or, test the load your app can handle before posting here.

SingAlong 14y ago

The app's assets (main.js and main.css) aren't being served properly. So right now I can only see a link to self on the homepage.

carlsednaoui 14y ago

Getting this error: Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory '/root/apps/status/client/static/assets/main/1340976517230.html' at Object.openSync (fs.js:240:18) at Object.readFileSync (fs.js:128:15) at ServerResponse.<anonymous> (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/lib/client/http.js:34:26) at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/root/apps/status/app.coffee:48:16) at EventEmitter.emit (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/eventemitter2/lib/eventemitter2.js:319:22) at Router.route (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/lib/http/router.js:18:15) at Object.handle (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/lib/http/index.js:96:54) at next (/root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/connect/lib/proto.js:190:15) at /root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:299:9 at /root/apps/status/node_modules/socketstream/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:322:9

anemic 14y ago
I hope the /root/ refers to the site's root directory and not root user's home directory. At least this confirms that it's actually running socketstream...
- wavephorm 14y ago
  Probably not a good idea to run NodeJS as root.
  - dedward 14y ago
    Why not... It's an age-old concept, one I've enforced over decades, but seriously..... nowadays, once you are in, you are in, and systems (at least the ones I've put together in recent yeras, I can only assume the same of others) are very regularly refreshed from scratch from servers that can't be reached from the public facing stuff. (so even if you manage to find that one old php server and find some bug and drop some php thingy on it, it's going to get squished in 30 seconds, give or take, as regular housekeeping takes place. If you managed to actually focus on the attack and go deeper, it might take longer -but root or no root, the damage you can do is the same either way, and limited hte same either way. EDIT: For the record - I still follow this practice, I'm just debating it's relevance these days. Things change, right?

foobarto 14y ago

The title remembers me on http://beautifulmind.io/ http://beautifulmind.io/ which was on HN some days ago

clickclack 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4164025 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4164025

paulbjensen 14y ago

Hi everyone, My apologies, I didn't expect to end up Top of HN. I'll try and get it back up. In the meantime, here is the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxf8f9AQBgM&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxf8f9AQBgM&feature=plcp

dcosson 14y ago
Thanks for posting, I'll have to come back later and check out the site. From the video I can't really tell if it's opensource or a hosted service. I'm also curious if there's an easy code import/export feature for individual widgets and/or the entire dashboard (all widgets, global styling, settings, etc). I don't think I'd use it for anything serious without being able to export the entire dashboard page and add it to my git repo (and being able to reload it if somethings gets lost or messed up). And being able to import/export individual widgets would make it easy for the community to share custom widgets so that in practice end users wouldn't actually have to write much code. Anyway, it looks like a cool project! EDIT: I see now there are REST api endpoints for creating & getting a dashboard, awesome.
paulbjensen 14y ago
Hi everyone, Once again, my apologies for the downtime. For some reason, this was the case: $ ulimit -n > 1024 I thought I had set the ulimit to unlimited, but that wasn't so. The site is alive, but may still be intermittent. Will keep you updated.
- ffk 14y ago
  Did you set the limit on the CLI or within your limits.conf file? limits.conf is how you persist the value between reboots.
  - paulbjensen 14y ago
    CLI (facepalm). Thanks for the tip.
    - 14y ago

al_james 14y ago

Seen a couple of startup's sites go down when they make the HN homepage lately, and both seem to be using node.js (according to the error messages). Not dissing node.js, but maybe its the wrong tool for the job.. Just use a static site for your landing page!

DavidPP 14y ago

I have tried most of those dashboard services and the best one by far for me is http://klipfolio.com/ http://klipfolio.com/

kno 14y ago

https://dashku.com/ https://dashku.com/ is not working for me.

hicham 14y ago

website is down

pkhamre 14y ago

Put Varnish in front of it, quick!

dedward 14y ago
Would that, without any configuration, actually fix this?

sidcool1234 14y ago

Not loading for me.

codebeaker 14y ago

Website is still down, that's a shame - OP can't even get the homepage back online before showing HN. 30 minutes to bring back a homepage is pretty bad man, also your personal homepage http://paulbjensen.co.uk http://paulbjensen.co.uk is returning NO CONTENT, is that on the same (bricked) server?

paulbjensen 14y ago
Hi, Apologies for the downtime. It turns out ulimit was set to 1024 when I thought I'd configured it to unlimited. As for paulbjensen.co.uk, I removed that site about 3 months ago but didn't remove the link to it in HN. As for your question about the same bricked server, the answer is no, I run Dashku on a different server to the server that was hosting paulbjensen.co.uk.

jeromegn 14y ago

This is great. I really like how you can test your widgets with sample data. Because of the lack of a decent dashboard solution, we've been running our own. We absolutely wanted to use D3 and we wanted to have multiple, toggleable pages. This might just do the trick.

sidcool1234 14y ago

Independent of what it does and all, you have designed the UI really good. Kudos for that.

covati 14y ago

So this is free for now, what are you thinking of charging?

jabo 14y ago

You shouldn't be serving your static landing pages and assets over node.js. Ideally you should have an nginx server reverse proxy dynamic requests to your node.js server. Nginx should serve the static assets before the requests hit the node server.

KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
You have some data to back up this recommendation?
- dedward 14y ago
  Indeed. I mean, it may very well be true, and without time to analyze, if you are highly confident in nginx and the rest of your server setup (it's not some other user definiable limit) you might as well. That said - building websites to handle load has no magic bullet. Sure, nginx is good. Far-future expires headers and cache-busting schemes to go with it are good too. CDN's are good. Varnish is good. Clusters are great too, for capacity and redundancy, but you need to be aware of stuff in all these cases, and every layer you add is also something else to manage and something else to break..... so really it has to come from test-driven results regarldess, so you are spot on. My beef with services like this (granted I haven't investigated fully) is I don't want hosted stuff. I get that's a huge market, but for confidentiality and other reasons, there is also a market for slightly more traditional stuff. I'd love a toolkit to make it easy to build arbitrary animated control panel-y things a-la Quest Spotlight on <whatever> for my apps... havent' found it yet, anyone know one?

jonny_eh 14y ago

This looks very slick, kudos! Small nitpick: why do I need to give myself a username when signing up?

lucian1900 14y ago

Much of the text in the page is not visible, and the layout is broken. Chrome 20 on Ubuntu 12.04.

masukomi 14y ago

demo page doesn't work in Chrome. Map doesn't do anything. updating text is in a thin column down the left side that scrolls off below the main image.

Cieplak 14y ago

(Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap)

nathanhammond 14y ago

Here is a little piece of a script I wrote to push the limits up on an Ubuntu box during setup (AWS). # Increase File Descriptor limits. export FILEMAX=`sysctl -n fs.file-max` sudo mv /etc/security/limits.conf /etc/security/limits.conf.bak sudo touch /etc/security/limits.conf sudo chmod 666 /etc/security/limits.conf echo "root soft nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf echo "root hard nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf echo "* soft nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf echo "* hard nofile $FILEMAX" >> /etc/security/limits.conf sudo chmod 644 /etc/security/limits.conf touch /home/ubuntu/.bash_profile echo "ulimit -n $FILEMAX" >> /home/ubuntu/.bash_profile # Increase Ephemeral Ports. sudo chmod 666 /etc/sysctl.conf echo "net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535" >> /etc/sysctl.conf sudo chmod 644 /etc/sysctl.conf

dedward 14y ago
You know it's odd. One one hand, the almost-greybeard in me wants people to stop screwing around with what I take to be standard unix concepts... what are the ephemeral ports, etc. On the other hand, when I take a close look at something like what you just posted, the level of control is hard to argue with - nothing wrong with that. The temptation is still to basically do what you did (thanks BTW) and just revert everything back to what it rightfully should be.... it served us just fine for ages. Or I'll switch to FreeBSD ,unless they're doing the same thing.

hegga 14y ago

thank you for this! just created a awesome dashboard very quick! :) why not create a kickstarter project and raise enough money so you can open source the code? i would definitely contribute!