Comment by bun_at_work
6 days ago
Hey - this is awesome. I've been working on a small local app like this to import financial data and present a dashboard, for the family to use together (wife and I). So yeah - great work here, taking control of your data.
I'm curious about real-time data, or cron jobs, though. I love the idea of importing my data into this, but it would be nicer if I could set it up to automatically poll for new data somehow. Does Timelineize do something like that? I didn't see on the page.
Cool, yeah, the finance use case seems very relevant. Someday it'd be cool to have a Finance exploration page, like we do for other kinds of data.
Real-time/polling imports aren't yet supported, but that's not too difficult once we land on the right design for that feature.
I tinkered with a "drop zone" where you could designate a folder that, when you add files to it, Timelinize immediately imports it (then deletes the file from the drop zone).
But putting imports on a timer would be trivial.
I have something set up at home: ~/Inbox and ~/Outbox. Anything dropped into ~/Outbox gets rsync'd to rsync.net and mv'd (locally) to ~/Inbox.
Anything in ~/Inbox is "safe to delete" because it's guaranteed to have an off-site backup.
Presumably a fancy management app would queue (or symlink) the full directory structure into ~/Inbox (which would then behave as a "streaming cache")
~/Inbox would effectively be available (read only) on "all machines" and "for free" with near zero disk space until you start accessing or pulling down files.
I use Dropbox to manage ~/Sync (aka: active, not "dead" files).
"Outbox", "Inbox", and "Sync" have been the "collaboration names" that resonated the most with me (along with ~/Public if you're old enough, and ~/Documents for stuff that's currently purely local)