Show HN: Turn your GitHub Gist into a live dashboard | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Turn your GitHub Gist into a live dashboard

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159 pointskantord26 comments

This is pretty neat...but is "dashboard" the proper descriptor here? I was expecting something completely different, when I clicked the link. Perhaps "turn your Gist into interactive charts" would be more appropriate?

Perhaps you could edit the data gists and it would work as a dashboard, sort of?

I would think you can use any source of yml, json. They say you can make your own backend.

Any CSV/JSON/etc. can be loaded as data. Since components (charts, text, layout, etc.) are just data, this is true of them as well. If you have your own backend you don't need Gists at all.

I think mentionning gist has set some people on the wrong trail :/

The example in the README is very simplistic, but in principle you can add many different charts in relatively complex layouts, to show all your different KPIs, etc. For now, you only have a few components but I do plan to add more. Tables, tabbed containers etc. Plus I want to add variable support.

Here's another example that is just a slightly more complex: http://bottoml.in/e/kantord/57ec4e9533fcc91f8d413cc760fd9bcd

And here's the source: https://gist.github.com/kantord/57ec4e9533fcc91f8d413cc760fd...

This example uses JSON format instead of YAML though.

The first chart on the more company led example doesn’t display correctly in safari on iphone.

https://m.imgur.com/NhoGFMg?r

Thanks. I'll look into that. Currently I just rely on billboard.js defaults regarding the sizing/internal layout of charts. Looks like this chart just has way too much data for their algorithm.

This is really cool but I still agree with ryannevius. Interactive charts would be more accurate. When I think dashboard, I think of a live feed of data with various tools for analyzing it.

I think of charts with data coming from different places, which is exactly what this does.

Is it really a 'live' dashboard if it's reading data from a static gist file?

It looks like it doesn't have to read data from a static gist file. It can read from any JSON source, and you can just have the formatting data in the gist.

Read it.

I was thinking: "oh, this is the kind of product I wanted to create when I first made https://github.com/fiatjaf/jq-web ", then I kept reading and found the following line: "you can use jq queries in your YAML file".

Turns out it is using my jq/emscripten wrapper. Pure magic of the destiny.

Thanks for creating jq-web :-) Without jq-web I would probably never even have started building this.

By the way I'm also working on a Javascript jq port. The main reason I'm doing that is that I want to reduce file size. Here's the repo in case you want to take a look at it. https://github.com/kantord/jq-in-the-browser

Amazing.

I initially didn't think it would be as powerful as jq. I've seen many people claiming to be doing "jq in Javascript", but they were only implementing the path searching part. Yours is truly amazing, it implements all the filters and the quirks of | syntax. I'll watch it.

About the jq-web size, it is greatly reduced in the minified version, but much better is the WASM version, not much for the size, but for the speed. Things are probably 10x or more faster there.

I'd like to run a backend. What's the setup?

(Couldn't find that in the docs; please forgive me if I missed it.)

Good point. I have added this section to README.md: https://github.com/kantord/just-dashboard/blob/master/README... Do you think this is a good explanation? I do plan to create an example project for this though.

> Do you think this is a good explanation?

no. I think the question is more "how do i replicate the stuff going on at http://bottoml.in/e/ so that i can have these show up under my domain" and that little code snippet falls very short.

it was also my first question when i looked at it, and the lack of answer part of why i wandered off.

Thanks for your comment. I'll think of a way of improving the documentation accordingly.

Actually, that code snippet is pretty much what's going on at https://bottoml.in/e/. There are 2 things I've removed from the example code because I thought they were irrelevant: 1) Loading GitHub Gists through their API 2) A code snippet that makes it possible to host single page apps on GitHub Pages.

I thought both of those things would be irrelevant because most probably you don't need either if you have your own backend.

In case you do need that code it's here: https://github.com/kantord/bottoml.in-e/blob/master/src/inde...

This is great! I've looking for a nice way to have interactive charts on my blog. I used Plotly but quickly discovered that they only support 500 views per day. Ended up just having pngs which isn't ideal

If you are only looking to embed charts in your blog you might be better off just using billboard.js directly https://naver.github.io/billboard.js/

That is what I used to create this project :-) Of course that only works if you have access to the source code / can embed your own code/dependencies somehow.

It is possible to embed visualizations using just-dashboard too, but you don't necessarily need to do that if you only need a pie chart on your blog or whatnot.

I think my project is more useful for quickly creating standalone shareable data oriented pages. Of course I don't want to discourage you from using my own project, I'm just suggesting an alternative. Nevertheless, improving embed-ability is a low-hanging fruit so I'll probably work in that.

This looks similar to http://visdown.com/.

WOW This looks amazing! Thanks for sharing it.

I think dashboard is a bit of a misnomer for what this produces.

Very nice

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