What options do I have to track UbuntuEdge fundraiser progress?

Question

I guess we all are very excited about Ubuntu Edge, and hope for the best that the 32 millions will be reached.

I would love to track the progress, but loading and refreshing the fundraiser site is distracting and not really handy.

I am interested in different ways of tracking the money/precentage.

I thought a screenlet desktop widget might be useful here, but I am unsure how to achieve this.

An indicator displaying current % would be ideal, but I guess that requires some more work.

Maybe a simple script that displays a notification whenever a full million is reached could be easy to prepare?

Answer 1

Stuart Langridge has put together a quick-and-dirty indicator to keep track of the current and projected totals for the fundraiser. He posted about it at: https://plus.google.com/108243663090085262773/posts/irW4n4abMs8

You can download the indicator script from http://ubuntuone.com/1g1yTcmnpDhVTB0Rp2UnbT and simply run it from the command line, or if you are on saucy (or raring with upstart user sessions) you can run it from an upstart user job:

start on desktop-start
stop on desktop-end
exec python /path/to/ubuntu-edge-indicator.py

stick those lines (with the right path in the exec line of course) in ~/.config/upstart/ubuntu-edge-indicator.conf and run the first time with start ubuntu-edge-indicator. Since it's an upstart job it'll start with your session from now on (or until you remove the upstart file).

I should note that this was the first upstart user job I defined in ~/.config/upstart so after writing the .conf file I had to log out and log in before the indicator would run from upstart.

EDITED TO ADD: My colleague Chris Wayne has packaged this indicator for precise and (I think) raring. It's available from his PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cwayne18/ubuntu-edge-indicator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-edge-indicator

Answer 2

I've packaged the indicator mentioned above, to install it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cwayne18/ubuntu-edge-indicator
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-edge-indicator
`

Answer 3

To address this specific aspect: but loading and refreshing the fundraiser site is distracting and not really handy.

A general way to lighten websites is by blocking the loading of "elements" you are not interested in thereby speeding up loading of the site. By blocking certain urls on various sites, I'm able to access sites that would normally take ages to load on a slow network.

Blocking loading can be done by means of the hosts file or by using an ad-blocking extension in your browser. I use AdBlock Plus which is available as a browser extension. The image shows the list of blockable URLs:

As an aesthetic measure which may not improve the loading time of the page, you could further block the display of elements you aren't interested in seeing by means of css. The Stylish extension available for Firefox and Chrome, allows you to create site-specific css rules to allow hiding of elements.