Hi everyone! Blinkenlights is a fun side-project app I made to be able to quickly see the status of anything you can dream up. I am obsessed with blinking status lights on hardware devices, so I used that as inspiration for a status dashboard UI. The app uses an open JSON protocol to drive the lights, and it's defined here: http://blinkenlights-api.jazzych... - the app comes with several example lights and registries for the S&P 500 stocks to show their change during the trading day. But you can create your own using the protocol above, and if you want you can contribute to the community registry so that others can use your lights. I also added the ability for people to manually add registries (e.g. if a company wanted to publish a list of lights internally for business-related statuses). Give it a try! I'll be adding more types of output displays over time and taking feedback from users. What do you think?
@jazzychad this is great. just read through the documentation. It's fascinating to see people continue to develop apps that allow non-app developers to have a native mobile experience.
Has anyone built custom blinking lights yet on the api (outside what I've seen in the community registry)? I'd love to subscribe to a few.
One thing that could be interesting to see in the future would be the ability to subscribe to push notifications on a per-light basis when the light status changes. For example, I would set up a blinking light that other people to subscribe to when my Friday Product Roundup is live (will definitely discuss binkenlights on it this week btw). A light would already tell people when it is "on air" but push notification would also remind them to tune in.
@matthartman Hi Matt! Yes, this is definitely something I've thought a lot about since my previous startup (Notifo) was squarely in the push notification business. Right now Blinkenlights only has a client-component and b/c of the JSON protocol has no central backend server to make it run (which is quite nice!) Adding push would complicate this a bit, but is absolutely possible. I'm adding a couple more 'display output' types (see this tweet for example: https://twitter.com/jazzychad/st... ) and then thinking deeply about push.
As for community lights, there aren't any that I know of yet (again, no central server so people would have to let me know), but it's probably because the app is so new that nobody's had time yet, but that's why I added the Community Registry section which will be updated as people make their own public registries :)
Can't wait to hear Friday Product Roundup this week!
@matthartman a quick update to say that the creator of https://statusgator.io has made a registry of blinkenlights for the top 5 most tracked services and I have added it to the Community Registries section! \o/
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