Dash (Sponsor)
Dash is a web app for building and sharing realtime dashboards. They look great in a browser tab, on your phone, or on a wall-mounted TV through Chromecast.
To help you get started quickly, Dash has pre-built dashboard widgets for all kinds of services like Google Analytics, appFigures, GitHub, Google News, and Twitter. There's also an API to display data from Dropbox or the web with custom widgets like speedometers, charts, tables, and leaderboards.
In a couple minutes you can set up a Dashboard to monitor your web servers with widgets for Pingdom, Chartbeat, and realtime Google Analytics. Or, you can track your fitness New Year's resolution with pre-built widgets for Fitbit, Strava, and Withings Scale. You can even keep an eye on your online mentions with Twitter and Google News widgets showing the search results of several different phrases.
Dash's pricing model was designed to encourage data sharing within the community. It's a lot like GitHub. If you make your data public, Dash is completely free. If you want to keep your dashboard private, you'll need a pro account for $10 per month.
Dash is currently running a limited time promotion. If you sign up for a free account now, you'll also get one private dashboard free forever. No credit card required.
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Our thanks to Dash for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. We spent some time yesterday setting up our own custom Dashboard for Tools & Toys, and Dash is awesome. There are a lot of drag-and-drop widgets, and you can write your own data to power any custom widgets (like charts, lists, etc.) The Dashboard we set up acts as a one-stop-page to see incoming tweets, current traffic numbers (hi, mom!), and more. And Dash is giving Tools & Toys readers one private dashboard for free, forever. Definitely worth checking out.