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Show HN: Ducksboard launched a new API and is giving away free subscriptions

45 points by wulczer ↗ HN
We've just launched our new, three-headed API (part of which is an open WebSocket server) and we'd like to thank this community for the all the help, feedback and inspiration. Ducksboard launched as a Show HN and countless hours that should've been dedicated to developing the product went into browsing the site (until we discovered noprocrast, yay!)

For the next 24 hours we're giving away free, full-featured plans to everyone with a HN account more than 10 days old, sign up at https://app.ducksboard.com/signup/hn/

These plans will always be free, but we can't promise we won't try to upsell you along the way, or add juicy new features and put them in paid-only plans :)

If you're curious about the API, the docs are at http://dev.ducksboard.com/ and there's a short blog post about it at http://blog.ducksboard.com/2012/04/introducing-the-ducksboard-api/

Thanks, HN!

32 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 82.9 ms ] thread
lamby
Can you tell me why I should move from geckoboard? (Not being snarky, I am not very happy with Geckoboard)
aitorciki
Hi lamby, I'm one of the co-founders at Ducksboard.

We approach things from a different angle than Geckoboard.

* As far as I know, they just visualize whatever comes from their data sources. We don't just visualize it, but we store it in our databases. This enables us to provide historic charts and other goodies.

* We make a strong focus on realtime as well, using WebSockets to push updates to the frontend as soon as they're available in the backend. I don't think they're going this far.

* The visual part is just a matter of taste, each one has a very particular style. We actually prefer ours :)

* And from today, our APIs allow handling your data and dashboards without a need to actually use the web frontend. This can be pretty useful in certain integration scenarios.

If you have more questions, feel free to ask.

lamby
The main beef I have with geckoboard is a litany of embarrassing unresolved bugs but these features sound pretty cool. Am trying out your API tutorial right now.
pmjoyce
Paul from Geckoboard here. Would love to hear how we can do better. Happy to respond here or you can shoot me a mail, paul at geckoboard.com
fomojola
All in all, minor issues, but: you filter out "target" attributes on URLs. I have links in my dashboard that I want to automatically open in another window so I don't close the dashboard window. Not sure why "target" is a banned attribute.

Also, public loop URLs don't appear to actually loop: I have 2 dashboards both added to the public loop, and nothing I seem to do will make them do that in either Firefox 11, Chrome 18 or Chrome 13 (on my Google TV that I use to display on a big screen).

Also, making your push interface public WOULD be a significant improvement over the existing interface: it gets tedious having to write authenticated web handlers purely to feed data to the dashboard, I'd much rather write cron jobs to do that.

pmjoyce
Thanks for the feedback.

The filtering of the "target" attribute is down to an overly aggressive attribute whitelist but I've created and story and that's being added now.

Looping issue - it's working for us and we've had no other reports of failure. Can you check the Sharing URLs tab under the account link to ensure that the dashboards in question are enabled for read-only viewing? This is off by default for security & privacy considerations but agree that the UX is currently sub-optimal. If you're still having problems then just ping me a mail: paul at geckoboard.com and I'll look into it.

We're just about to make the push API public for everyone (early next week), in the meantime feel free to shoot me a mail with your account deets and I'll enable it for you.

dclaysmith
I have played around with Geckoboard and I don't love it. I like the UI of Ducksboard more and am inclined to continue with it.

My biggest wish of these services is that they would fluidly, and intelligently expand to utilize the full width of the screen they are on.

aitorciki
The widgets layout is one of the fields we're trying to improve next.

The UX guys are looking for a way to keep it user-friendly while allowing power users to have more control over the layout.

More news on this topic soon!

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
plant42
Have signed up, played with the tutorial and now persuading my management to pay for the full account and use Ducksboard as our primary dashboard.

Great work guys.

manuscreationis
I see lots of GitHub support... any plans to show BitBucket some love?

(We HG users need metrics too, you know...)

aitorciki
Of course! Even if I don't have an ETA to give you right now. We're adding many new services per month, prioritizing based on users requests.
manuscreationis
Awesome, great to hear.

I've got a few side projects I'm trying to start, and I'll look at using DB to track some metrics where it makes sense.

Thanks, and good luck

Urgo
Cool thanks! One suggestion though. The video on your home page. Allow full screen :) The full screen button didn't do anything and had to navigate to vimeo to watch it full screen. It convinced me to give the site a shot though.
dmarinoc
Oooops... thanks for reporting this! :)
ismarc
We've been looking for a dashboard for our engineering group to get some better real-time visibility into the health of our systems (been weighing internal run and hosted solutions). That said, we have a massive amount of data coming in we'd like to track and I couldn't find anything about volume, data-rate or event-rate limits/pricing. However, part of the $29 plan info is obscured by the signup button, so it may just be hidden (Android device). On only a mildly related note, I only get a pleasant wood panel background on a dev account sand the demo on the same device, no menu, no widgets, nothing.
aitorciki
Depending on the Android version and browser you're using, the webapp won't work properly. It's working on Android 3 and 4 stock browser, as well as Chrome Beta. Some browsers on Android 2 are compatible as well, like Firefox beta last time I had a look. Let us know which is your setup and I'll be able to give you more insight.

As for the rate limiting, we don't limit at the moment. If you really have a lot of data you want to push, let us now first so we can take action if needed to increase our capacity. Until now no limiting has been needed, and some users have been pushing a lot of updates for some months now.

ismarc
It's running 2.3 with the stock browser, no huge worries on it not working, I had a chance to look at stuff from a full-fledged computer and it worked decidedly better :).

That said, I'd like to discuss our particular scenario(s) and volume, is the contact@ducksboard.com the right email to go ahead and shoot a message to?

molsongolden
Signed up and looking forward to getting things set up this evening but I didn't receive a confirmation email!

Did I enter the wrong email address or do you not send them out?

aitorciki
We don't send email confirmation on signup. If you didn't see some error in bold red letters, you're set :)
Sukotto
Where do I see my account details like account age, (non-)expiry date, data-rate (or other) restrictions for my tier, sales page describing what cool features I should pay the higher tier to get, etc?

I signed up with your special link and can't tell if I did it correctly, or if I simply have some trial time left from a previous signup. (I remember signing up for a trial the last time you hit the front page, submitting some bug reports via twitter, then getting distracted by real life and forgetting I had an account)

dmarinoc
Good point.

We currently have one paid plan without any restrictions, so there´s no much to show. If you are a "standard plan" user, you'll see a trial countdown notification at the top bar and your payment options at your account preferences. If you have a HN account, you won't see anything of this.

If you have specific doubts regarding to your account status, send us an email to contact_At_ducksboard.com

manveru
I don't see any data in the widgets, the javascript console tells me that the websocket closes and tries to reconnect every 10 seconds or so. Browser is chromium 18, let me know if you need any more information.
aitorciki
Hi manveru.

Your username (email) in Ducksboard would help us track down the problem.

You can create a support ticket using the application's menu "Support" option to handle this communication and future question we may need to ask.

sync
New APIs look great! I would love to see the ability to increment a value via the API instead of pushing the total. We have a lot of events we would love to track, but don't want to store the total locally.
aitorciki
This is something many people have been asking for, and we always listen to what people say :)

The feature is in design phase, we're pretty close to implement it. Expect to see it landing in the next few weeks.

RollAHardSix
The widgets (oh how I loathe that word) snap into place; could this...is this....an optional...option. That's perhaps one of the strangest sentences I've constructed in awhile. Although having it snap helps most people stay organized and uncluttered; I actually would prefer the ability to be more...creative.

This is fantastic of you thanks!

ozkakko
I'd like to have a premium account of rapidshare. rapidshare is so slowly. ozkakko@gmail.com