Recently, a coworker mentioned that we should have a dashboard to make some of the metrics we are tracking more visible. It reminded me of this post (via Adafruit) I read about Dashing.
We were able to get Dashing running very quickly. This post about setting up a Dashing dashboard was quite helpful as was this one about installing the right Ruby version. Most of the installations I read about used an external server to host the dashboard, which wasn’t really an option for us. For those that don’t have a good place to host, you can try installing Dashing on the Raspberry Pi, as we did. The raspi doesn’t have a ton of horsepower, so compiling binaries and such will take longer than you might be used to, but it has no problem running Dashing.
So far, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Dashing. It’s easy to set up, there are a bunch of additional widgets available, and creating your own widgets isn’t difficult.
As an experiment, we cooked up the basic World Cup widget shown here. It has quickly become the most referenced dashboard widget in the office.
I’ve created a Simple In/Out Board Widget for Dashing. It’s quite basic, but it gets the job done. It reads the status information from a text file, so there’s little overhead and no pretty interface, sorry. We keep our text file on Dropbox, so any of us can edit it easily.
Unlike most of the other widgets we’ve created for our Dashing dashboard at the office, this one might be useful for other people. So, I’m sharing it. If you’re interested, you can install from this gist.
Update 2015-12-10: Someone in the comments was trying to get this to work with Google Drive. I tweaked the widget a bit so it can read a file from Google Drive. The gist has been updated.
Last year, we set up a Dashing dashboard in the office. One of our favorite bits was the quote widget, which cycled through a list of quotes that we occasionally added to. I’ve left the organization and the company has been acquired, so that dashboard is dark. However, I felt the collection of quotes should be memorialized, so here they are, along with a random photo of Steve Zissou, our patron saint (for lack of a better term).
Oh my gosh! Doge is going to look so good…
– Kate
The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
– Andrew S. Tanenbaum
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
– Jamie Zawinski
Design is all about finding solutions within constraints. If there were no constraints, it’s not design – it’s art.
– Matias Duarte
The value of an idea lies in the using of it.
– Edison
A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion. The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.
– Google Design Team
There’s music in a hammer, there’s music in a nail. There’s music in a cat, if you step on it’s tail.
– Mike Hell
I think quotes are very dangerous things.
– Kate Bush
It’s a new day.
– Daniels
All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.
– David Wheeler
Are you saying I’m fat?
– Usability Participant #3
Simplicity takes courage.
– Softcard
When done well, software is invisible.
– Bjarne Stroustrup
On two occasions I have been asked, – “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”
– Charles Babbage
Zawinski’s Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
– Jamie Zawinski
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.
– Grady Booch
If you’re willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better.
– John Carmack
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
– Edsger W. Dijkstra
Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.
– Muhammad Waseem
We have a responsibility to be teachers — that this should be a central part of [our] jobs… it’s just logic that some day we won’t be here.
– Ed Catmull
Snackbars are so cool! Toasts are like, whatever.
– Kate
David St. Hubbins: It’s such a fine line between stupid, and uh… Nigel Tufnel: Clever. David St. Hubbins: Yeah, and clever.
– This is Spinal Tap
The best way to improve your presentation is to get better content.
– Edward Tufte
It’s been five minutes since Adobe asked me to install an update. I hope they didn’t go out of business or something.
– Bill Murry
There are three great design themes: making something beautiful, making something easier, and making something possible.
– Dan Saffer
Everyone loves my pretty pink fur, and casting spells is fun for sure!
– Shipit
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
– Josh Billings
Design is only obvious in retrospect.
– Luke Wroblewski
Smartphones can sometimes make you feel dumb.
– Usability Participant #3
If you have to ask ‘will this annoy users?’ the answer is always yes.
– Matt Galligan
I missed the 20th anniversary of this site by a couple days (it was on the 7th). Ten years ago, I marked the occasion by listing the most popular posts.
Homebrew Yaesu FT-857D Soundcard Cable
Bose 901 Equalizer Repair
A Dashing Dashboard with Raspberry Pi
PSK31 with an FT-857D and a Mac
More PSK31
NYC to Montreal and Back (in Four Parts)
Motorcycle Parking at NYC Muni-Meters
Pomodoro Timer
Temperature Logging with Twine and ThingSpeak
DIY Air Variable Capacitor
The only post that appears on both lists is about the motorcycle trip to Montreal. I’m always surprised with the number of people interested in making a soundcard cable or repair a Bose 901 EQ. By the way, PDF schematic diagram for that EQ is not represented on this list, but is probably viewed more than any of these other pages.