jondot / dash

Communicate to the mass with Dash on your TV/LCD/Plasma

Dash

Dash is a simple web application for dashboard like notifications.

• Commit messages via github web hooks for your developers.
• Announcements for your managers
• Headlines for your visitors
• Insert your use case here

Getting Started

Dash is a node.js application, also built to be compatible with Heroku. Push it to a free Heroku instance in a minute:

$ git clone https://github.com/jondot/dash
$ cd dash
$ heroku create -s cedar
$ git push heroku master

If you want it on your local servers, do this

$ git clone https://github.com/jondot/dash
$ cd dash
$ npm install
$ node dash

Showing Messages

Dash was built to have a very simple interface and a very specific goal: showing messages in an aesthetic way.

Submit new messages via Dash's RESTful interface to a parameter named content:

POST http://your-dash-instance.com/messages

Here is a quick example with curl:

curl -d "content={\"body\": \"I have had it with these motherf*ckin’ snakes on this motherf*ckin’ plane!\", \"effect_on\":\"bounceInDown\", \"effect_off\":\"fadeOutDownBig\"}" http://localhost:3000/messages

Example content:

{
  'body' : 'hello world!',
  'whom':  'john doe',
  'thumb': '48px-thumb-url',
  'time':  'long time ago'
}

You can also customize the effects. This will fade out the current message and will 'tada' the new message in:

{
  'body' : 'hello world!',
  'whom':  'john doe',
  'thumb': '48px-thumb-url',
  'time':  'long time ago',
  'effect_on': 'tada'
  'effect_off': 'fadeOut'
}

For a list of kinds of effects, check out Animate.css.

Showing Messages from Github

Somewhat later, I've added a parsers mechanism. The goals were to allow anyone to take a request and build a Dash message format out of it. A sample github parser is included in parsers/github.coffee.

So now, in order to use Dash for your Github POST hooks, you need to specify this kind of URL:

http://your-dash-instance.com/messages?dash_from=github

And it will load the github parser on any POST request, so that it could parse the github-specific payload parameter into the Dash specific message format.

Make sure to ping me if you wrote a new kind of parser so that I can include it in!.

Something Missing?

I've intentionally reduced the scope of the things I wanted to do and the features I could have implemented. If you see something missing, let me know -- but keep in mind what I've just described.

Contributing

Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2011 Dotan Nahum @jondot. See MIT-LICENSE for further details.