Show HN: I made an open-source personal dashboard builder | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made an open-source personal dashboard builder

github.com

68 pointsalexpate48 comments

Confusing title since "dashboard" appears nowhere on the page. Better description might be "An open-source dynamic link-in-bio" (AKA Linktree alternative)

I couldn't figure out what it was from the README, I am surprised it made the homepage of HN. If the author reads this, I suggest updating the README and resubmitting it to HN sometime in the future.

Edit: The app website explains it much better: https://glow.as/

> An open-source dynamic link-in-bio

FWIW, I understand what a "Dashboard" means, never heard of a "link-in-bio" before. From the website, it seems to be something like an "About" page? But dynamic I guess.

Link-in-bio comes from social platforms where you're allowed 1 url in your profile but need to show many links (also in situations where some of the links may go to content that could get you banned if placed on site ie OF).

I'm not sure of the value of making it more than it needs to be.

And posts with links in them are punished in different ways, like getting suppressed in algorithmic feeds. So instead of just linking to a thing directly people are left with mentioning “link in bio”.

To me, "Dashboard" means something like "live visualizations for monitoring data that changes frequently".

The glow.as website has more information and examples: https://glow.as/

> Glow is a single link that you can use to house all the links to your social media profiles, websites, and other content. It's a great way to share all your content in one place, whether it be your favourite songs on Spotify, or a link to your latest products.

> Drag & drop

> Build your page block by block in minutes.

This looks interesting !

Here's an example: https://glow.as/alex

Feedback for the team: the landing page offers me no insight into what this is. The "introduction" link points to the same file that is hosted.

At a minimum, I expect a screenshot (preferrably multiple) and example code snippets that show some of what can be done. This is general guidance for any open source repository that desires other people to use it, not limited to this project.

I'd expect the GH page to have similar content to the actual website, https://glow.as/. I only found that by searching for a link, which was the big leader image on the GH page. At the very least, add a textual "website" link to the GH landing page.

Should we know what "link in bio" means? How is that a "personal dashboard"?

Good question.

For the team: From the term "personal dashboard," I was expecting something that would allow me to track data that's important to me, locally, like if I want to track my sleep stats and my spending and my food intake and whatever else. That's what "personal dashboard" means to me, and I was excited for a self-hosted, open source, clean way to do that.

Maybe that product exists, but sadly it has nothing to do with this one.

I just so happen to be working on one! It stemmed from my dissatisfaction with the existing meal tracking apps I’ve tried.

Initially I’d wanted to track spending as well but apps like YNAB cover this use-case better than I can in the near term so I struck it from the roadmap.

I’m trying to focus on health: meal planning and workout scheduling in a system flexible enough to make suggestions as your exercise regimen (and thus your nutritional requirements) change. Will also be looking into sleep tracking and other metrics.

Let me know if there’s anything else you’d want to see from an app like this. Happy to shoot you a link to the repo when the MVP gets off the ground.

I think most of the problem I run into is that I don't use a lot of mainstream services. Like, my step count, heart rate, and weight info isn't in FitBit and Google Health. It's in GadgetBridge and openScale. And I'm not syncing it to my computer with Dropbox or Google Drive. It happens through syncthing.

Most of my "system," if I can even call it that, is held together by a whole lot of duct tape and bubblegum and commands I ran one time that I found on StackOverflow.

I haven't updated this in years but this was my attempt at building a real time personal dashboard, connecting various API's and components.

Was pretty helpful for me, basically acted as a heads up display that I could look at to track my stats over the day (steps, meditation, focus time, etc.)

https://github.com/Andreilys/personal_dashboard

Grafana miiiight be what you're looking for if that type of data is something you already have stored elsewhere.

There are TONS.

Personal dashboard builder is like project #2 or #3 right after TODO lists when it comes to new coders it seems like.

Well, right, but largely for that reason, most of them suck.

A link in bio is primarily used by social media influencers. It would usually link to their other social media pages, a merch website, and stuff like that. It solves the issue of most social media platforms only allowing one link

16th president; freed the slaves

in the south

It comes across as like linktree but with some nicer features. Linktree+ on steroids.

Looks like it's a feed that combines various (personal) sources.

Cool project! I clicked on it hoping it was a way to easily visualize my own personal stats. Anyone know of a project like that? Grafana for personal data :)

> Anyone know of a project like that?

Zenobase https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411518

Flow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14279515

Wolfram Blog post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680283

RoutineTap (dead) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231406

And more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=personal%20dashboard

Flow appears to be unmaintained unfortunately.

This space is always a massive graveyard it seems.

I made a tool for capturing data in JSON [0]. It's not in real-time but when I want to use my logs to troubleshoot something I have a local React project with https://github.com/plouc/nivo to make my own visualizations.

But for something you can host yourself I've used https://github.com/onejgordon/flow-dashboard in the past

[0] https://www.idiotlamborghini.com/strategies/weave

This is precisely what I was hoping for. This really isn't a dashboard for personal use as the title implies.

So, Grafana? ;)

This is great! Really nice on the eyes and well organized. It did take me a while to figure out what to look for though - as others have mentioned. I had to find the actual link on the GitHub page then browse the homepage to understand what it was. When I saw it though, I really liked it.

I'd love to see this expanded to non-software engineers. Artists, for example, could also use this.

edit: I spoke too soon. I see that artists can use this as well. The icon gallery needs a couple more, like Soundcloud, but the basics are there for everyone. Great job!

I wouldn't say a 'link in bio' page === personal dashboard. Having said that, this looks like a really nice link in bio product, congrats on the launch!

I always see these services targeted to individuals, but have you considered targeting SMBs? So many restaurants, plumbers, etc. have TERRIBLE websites that they struggle to maintain properly for various reasons. I don't see any reason that a tool like this wouldn't be sufficient.

Also just a flag that I get a 404 when I try to see the project's license.

I've always wondered if many company's website should simply be a high resolution webcam pointed at a chalkboard on their premiesis.

Some feedback:

- It's a very cool idea, and massive congrats on the launch!

- This has been done before, but a slick looking open source version is very cool! Have you looked at the concept of now pages, as this might lean into that? https://nownownow.com/about

- Personal dashboard builder is a poor term for this, as it implies a dashboard for personal data/usage.

- Link in bio is also a poor term, I suspect it's not a popular / well-known term. Personal Homepage is probably the best I can think of. Or now page perhaps?

- This GitHub readme says very little of substance, which gives me... "unfinished side project" vibes.

Best of luck with it!

Congrats on the launch, I think I'll try this out and consider it for self hosting.

If you want to connect with different segments, packaging this to make it available for things like yunohost (one click install) could be really valuable as more than a few ppl on tools like can have their own domains already setup.

I think the github landing page would remove a bunch of the questions below if you put screenshots of the steps and different kinds of outputs, and if it's really fun an animated gif that covers the entire experience in a few seconds (almost too fast).

Terrible description of what it is but the demo on twitter does look very nice.

If this could pull from custom APIs as well that'd be great. Maybe a few generic UI components for different kinds of data.

Example page link on the site is currently bringing up an application error.

Application error: a server-side exception has occurred (see the server logs for more information). Digest: 2870927976

It's really nice to see a "link in bio" product that is open source and self-hostable.

I would like to see how the page editor looks and works, but there are no screenshots on the GitHub page (https://github.com/tryglow/glow) or in the hosted version (https://glow.as/).

I like it, it looks really nice. To create an account on glow.as requires either Twitter or Google and I have neither. Self hosting appears to be hosting the entire project like I run my own server like glow.as for people to create their dashboards.

I wish either to allow creating an account with an email or like a mini version to build a single dashboard.

I see that this is early. It would be nice to have a screenshot and a description. Like other readers, I suggest adding some more info to the readme and/or a link to the website. The license is also missing (there's a link but it gives a 404).

My trouble is why on earth, if you want people to use your thing, don’t you have a demo or gif of it working right on your README!

I instantly give up on projects that don’t bother to SHOW.

DONT TELL ME, SHOW ME!

Please provide an email sign up option. X and Google are not companies many of us want to use anymore (if even we ever did for sign-ups).

The link-in-bio pages themselves break occasionally with WebGL disabled (MacOS/Safari/Lockdown Mode enabled).

Curious how this manages to be free but uses the X api which, iirc, requires you to pay get timeline data.

How does this compare to linktree?

I wouldn't assume people know what a link-in-bio is. I've never heard of it.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah I think we need to play around with some different terms. A few others have suggested "personal homepage builder", or something similar along those lines.

The link to license is broken. It links to LICENSE.md instead of LICENSE

Thanks for noticing this. Just pushed up a fix!

somehow 25kb of HTML turned into 3500kb of JS

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