Sep 18, 2013 by Matt | Posted in Software & Scripts
Need to throw together a quick dashboard with live-updated information and statistical readouts? Dashing is a fun new framework built atop Sinatra that lets you quickly setup dashboards, much in the style of Microsoft’s “Metro” UI. You can leverage premade widgets (which include numerical readouts, meters, graphs and lists) or make your own with HTML, SCSS, CoffeeScript and a bit of Ruby. Dashing uses Batman.js and rufus-scheduler to run server-side jobs at scheduled intervals and update the browser.
A live demo of Dashing can be seen here.
I know I’m going to have a bit of fun setting up personal dashboards that pull in various fun statistics. There are already quite a few pre-made widgets out there, which should be helpful.
Sep 11
If you have worked at all with Linux, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a package manager. Type a short command and instantly install software. Programming languages even have their own these days, for managing libraries. Ruby has RubyGems, Node has NPM, PHP…
Sep 4
One popular way to deploy a web application, or even a set of static HTML files in the case of Jekyll blogs, is to add a bare repository on your server with a post-receive hook that catches the files when they’re pushed and copies…
Aug 28
LESS has been a popular way to streamline your CSS-writing for a while now, but fitting it into your workflow isn’t always easy. Some designers use standalone applications like CodeKit or SimpLESS to compile their LESS files into browser-ready CSS, but I prefer a…
Aug 21
RandomUser is a new API that returns a JSON object with a randomly generated persona—complete with name, avatar and email address—for your testing purposes. The site suggests using it for design mockups, but the fact that it’s an API opens up plenty of possibilities…
Aug 14
On a whim, I decided to browse through GitHub’s Explore section recently. I don’t know whether users go there often or not (I certainly don’t), but there are some intriguing statistics there that tell a thing or two about what’s popular and who’s using…
Aug 7
I’ve recently started using Jekyll for one of my blogs recently, and while it’s a solid blog engine, there’s one thing its small community lacks. Themes. While I like to roll my own themes, some people want a drop-in option so they can start…
Jul 31
When someone submits a post from Boing Boing to Reddit, one of the first comments to appear is usually complaining of “blogspam.” This term, though sometimes used unfairly, is intended to deride a blog post that only contains a brief summary or quotation to…
Jul 24
There are already plenty of alternatives to plain old Lorem Ipsum text, the ever-popular Hipster Ipsum being just one of many. But what about images? Why use boring grey boxes like the one Placehold.it generates when you could have kittens? That’s right, kittens. Placekitten…