GeekTool has been around for years for the Mac. It is a great utility for overlaying information onto your computer desktop. Recently it was released through the Mac App Store. A friend of ours Don McAllister of Screencastsonline.com also recently did a members introduction show to GeekTool.
I have been playing a lot with IFTTT.com and Yahoo pipes. But what if we want to monitor some site and web service statuses directly and have it show up on our Mac desktop all the time?
That is where GeekTool comes in handy. Just add a couple of Shell Script objects to your desktop. Make sure to set the display status to feedback image, choose a reasonable refresh period and a suitable title via the override text fields as seen below.
Here are two shell scripts. One monitors status for a WoW Realm I made for some friends. The other is the example of monitoring the FiT Web site status via downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
WoW Realm Status:
curl –silent http://us.battle.net/api/wow/realm/status?realms=t
horium-brotherhood | grep -m1 -E ‘status’ | awk -F “:” ‘{print $5}’ | awk -F “,” ‘{print $1}’ | grep true
FiT Site Status:
curl –silent http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.friendsintech.com | awk -F “</span> is ” {‘print $2}’ | grep up
