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?

JC's picture

Yay! Here is my...

Yay! Here is my status page!

I used to have a "weather" page that was supposed to be a status page and abandoned it, but I was glad to be reinspired and surrounded by brothers and sisters who know the score.

One of the things I'm doing that you all might find interesting is dating each item so people know how recently each individual item was updated. Now I just need to figure out all the stuff that should be on there.

It sure would be nice if there was a way to view multiple status pages at once or on one page. XML format anyone? I suppose we could just subscribe to them if they are being fed through RSS. And, that being the case, I guess I could also give the link to my status page as an RSS feed. Yay Wordpress!

 
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