This is my first google gadget I have created a simple gadget which simply polls a URL every 5mins and displays the result.

It is designed to work with a server side script that will return a small text string that will be useful to display. You can actually set up a number of URLs to monitor.

Download a copy here: ServerMonitor2

For my purposes it displays, the hostname and server load of 2 applications, these applications are in a server cluster, so the hostname tells me which node the application is running on, and the system load is a good indicator of usage.

Server Side Code

The server side code can be as simple as this:
< ? php
$host = trim(`hostname`);
$fiveMinAvg = trim(`uptime | cut -f 5 -d ,`);
echo $host . ' (' . $fiveMinAvg .')';
?>

Let me know if you like it!

More Information including new development, Feature wishlists.

The Temperature at my place now is: °C full graphs here

Using a couple of Dallas/Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensors, a simple circuit and 2 simple pieces of software I have been able to track and graph the temperature of my home, indoors and out using my PC. I started this project in the hope of measuring the benefit of Insulation batts in my roof.

I got the Dallas/Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensors as free samples ordering over maxim-co.com website.

The circuit and software to read the sensors I found on martybugs.net http://martybugs.net/electronics/tempsensor/hardware.cgi

The Software that reads the sensors is called digitemp and can be found at : http://www.digitemp.com/software.shtml

The graphs are provided by the excellent but often misunderstood rrdtool http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

The rrdtool scripts I use and the scripts I use to read the temperature every 5 mins can be found here

If you want to do this yourself I really recommend following the steps on martybugs.net as it is rather complete.

It’s great to have this information, In the end I didn’t get a good idea on the insulation effect as I only had the sensors running for 3 days before the installers turned up.