Seth Godin's "Websheet"
 
Derek Scruggs pointed out Seth Godin’s post about wanting a “websheet”...well, feast your eyes on a quick process I whipped up to show how Anthracite can help do this today. Based on his example, we whip up a page that has the Yahoo stock quote, a few rankings of Seth’s books on Amazon, and the top 10 results from Google for his name. But it’s not just a webpage, Anthracite generates CSV of the data and makes it easily downloadable into your favorite (or not) current spreadsheet program. Set this up as a cron job (or AppleScript iCal) and you’ve got an instant daily report of this custom data. Rather have your results in RSS or XML, no problem, just use a different report format.
 
Check out the example output. This took less than half an hour to set up, including this blog post.
 
 

And, Anthracite also has a built in table view for viewing these results in a spreadsheet format! It may not be quite easy enough for my grandmother to do it, but I’ll bet Seth could figure this out pretty quickly. (I know an O’Reilly author who did.)
 
Friday, September 29, 2006