Overview

This week I decided to go over the trending repositories on Github. I came by an amazing tool Glance which is a a very powerful and rich tool to create dashboards. As I work on minimizing my digital life, this tool seems to be an ideal replacement of constantly checking out your favorite blogs, Youtube channels, RSS feeds or Subreddit posts. This tool combines them all by creating a minimalistic and customizable dashboard that you can modify to match all of your needs.

From following your favorite Twitch channels and checking out market prices to monitoring Docker container status and server stats - you can combine all of these within a single dashboard thanks to Glance.

Prerequisites

All you need to have the Glance running is Docker. If you’re a Mac user you can download Docker Desktop, otherwise please check out the official guide to install docker.

Running Glance

In order to run Glance the following commands should be executed.

mkdir glance && cd glance && curl -sL https://github.com/glanceapp/docker-compose-template/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz | tar -xzf - --strip-components 2

Afterwards, you can check out your localhost port 8080 and you will see Glance running!

regular

So Great! Glance dashboard is now running, let’s move to the fun part!

Configuring Glance Dashboard

Glance offers dozens of feature to configure the dashboard for your needs. Some of it includes

  • RSS feeds
  • Subreddit posts
  • Hacker News posts
  • Weather forecasts
  • YouTube channel uploads
  • Twitch channels
  • Market prices
  • Docker containers status
  • Server stats

First, I decided top add my favorite Youtube channels. In order to do that, you need to edit home.yml file. Find the videos section in the yaml and add the slugs of your favorite channels. Mine looked liked this:

        - type: videos
          channels:
            - UCsBjURrPoezykLs9EqgamOA # Fireship
            - UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw # Linus Tech Tips

Afterwards, I added the stock market prices I’m interested in. You need to find the markets widget in the same file and add/remove the stock tickers.

I configured RSS feeds, Subreddits, time and calendar and the final file looked like this

- name: Home
  # Optionally, if you only have a single page you can hide the desktop navigation for a cleaner look
  # hide-desktop-navigation: true
  columns:
    - size: small
      widgets:
        - type: calendar
          first-day-of-week: monday
        - type: rss
          limit: 10
          collapse-after: 3
          cache: 12h
          feeds:
            - url: https://selfh.st/rss/
              title: selfh.st
            - url: https://ciechanow.ski/atom.xml
            - url: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/rss.xml
              title: Josh Comeau
            - url: https://samwho.dev/rss.xml
            - url: https://ishadeed.com/feed.xml
              title: Ahmad Shadeed

    - size: full
      widgets:
        - type: group
          widgets:
            - type: hacker-news
            - type: lobsters

        - type: videos
          channels:
            - UCsBjURrPoezykLs9EqgamOA # Fireship
            - UCtxdfwb9wfkoGocVUAJ-Bmg # Travis Scott

        - type: group
          widgets:
            - type: reddit
              subreddit: technology
              show-thumbnails: true
            - type: reddit
              subreddit: selfhosted
              show-thumbnails: true
            - type: reddit
              subreddit: devops
              show-thumbnails: true
            - type: reddit
              subreddit: armenia
              show-thumbnails: true

    - size: full
      widgets:
        - type: weather
          location: Yerevan, Armenia
          units: metric # alternatively "imperial"
          hour-format: 12h # alternatively "24h"
          # Optionally hide the location from being displayed in the widget
          # hide-location: true

        - type: markets
          markets:
            - symbol: BTGD
              name: STKD Bitcoin & Gold ETF
            - symbol: BTC-USD
              name: Bitcoin
            - symbol: NVDA
              name: NVIDIA
            - symbol: ECNS
              name: iShares MSCI China Small-Cap
            - symbol: IEUR
              name: iShares Core MSCI Europe ETF
            - symbol: KWEB
              name: KraneShares CSI China Internet ETF
            - symbol: MCHI
              name: iShares MSCI China ETF
            - symbol: RSBA
              name: Return Stacked Bonds & Merger Arbitrage ETF                     
            - symbol: RSSB
              name: Return Stacked Global Stocks & Bonds ETF
            - symbol: RSST
              name: Return Stacked US Stocks & Managed Futures ETF
            - symbol: RSSY
              name: Return Stacked US Stocks & Futures Yield ETF
            - symbol: VGK
              name: Vanguard European Stock Index Fund ETF

Changing the theme

Afterwards, I decided to make the dashboard more visually appealing for me. For that you need to edit the theme section of glance.yml file. I chose the following theme:

theme:
  background-color: 225 14 15
  primary-color: 157 47 65
  contrast-multiplier: 1.1

And here is the result:

changed_theme

Glance also gives the opportunity to create your own widgets, which I will go through in future blogposts.

Conculsion

Glance is a very simple and powerful tool that can help everyone to create their personalized dashboards. It is easy to use, has a lot of prebuilt features that can be used to create personalized dashboards and forget about constantly checking your phone, as you can have all of your favorite tools in a single dashboard.

I’m planning to deploy Glance and add a subdomain to it in order to acess it from everywhere. It is mobile-friendly and has tons of customizable features. A very big thank you to developers!