Building My Personal Information Dashboard with Glance

A lightweight, customizable home for RSS, stocks, Reddit, weather, and more

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to reduce the number of tabs, apps, and bookmarks I check every day. Between RSS, stock prices, Reddit, weather, and various API status pages, things were getting a bit too scattered.

I wanted one clean homepage where I could see everything at a glance (yep, pun intended 😌). That’s how I ended up discovering Glance, an open-source, self-hosted dashboard that turned out to be exactly what I needed.

In this post, I’ll walk through how I use Glance, how I feed it content from Inoreader, and how I’m planning to extend it with iframes and custom widgets later on. Hopefully this helps anyone who’s trying to build a minimalist personal control panel of their own 💛

Why Glance?

Glance is a tiny, fast, self-hosted dashboard engine. What I love about it:

• ✨ Super lightweight — a single binary or small Docker image
• 🧩 Highly customizable — tabs, layouts, themes, multiple columns
• 📡 Tons of widgets — RSS, Reddit, weather, markets, APIs, html/iframe
• 🔒 Fully local & privacy-friendly
• 🧘 Minimalist design — perfect as a personal homepage

The whole system revolves around a single YAML config file. You define your widgets there, and Glance renders a clean dashboard in your browser.

My Use Case: One Dashboard, Everything I Care About

Here’s what I wanted to consolidate:

• RSS feeds → curated through Inoreader
• Stock tickers → quick daily watchlist
• Reddit → a few subreddits I check often
• Weather → current + upcoming
• API/Service status → personal projects
• Future: iframe embeds → dashboards, charts, etc.

Before Glance, this lived across 5+ different apps/tabs. Now it’s just one page. uwu (｡•ω•｡)ﾉ♡

Step 1 — Preparing My RSS with Inoreader

I use Inoreader as my main RSS manager — it filters, tags, categorizes, and keeps everything tidy.

My workflow:

1. I collect and organize RSS feeds inside a specific Inoreader folder.
2. Inoreader lets me export that entire folder as a single RSS feed URL.
3. I paste that URL directly into Glance’s RSS widget.

This keeps my dashboard simple: → I manage RSS inside Inoreader → Glance reads the final curated output

Zero duplication, zero clutter.

Step 2 — Installing Glance

I run Glance in Docker (super easy):

mkdir glance && cd glance
curl -sL https://github.com/glanceapp/docker-compose-template/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz \
  | tar -xzf - --strip-components 2

docker compose up -d

Then open: http://localhost:8080

Boom — empty dashboard waiting to be customized ✨

Step 3 — Building My Dashboard Layout

Here’s a simplified version of my actual glance.yml configuration:

pages:
  - name: Home
    columns:
      - size: small
        widgets:
          - type: rss
            title: "Inoreader Feeds"
            limit: 10
            feeds:
              - url: "https://my-exported-inoreader-rss-url"

          - type: weather
            title: "Weather"
            location: "San Francisco, US"
            units: metric

      - size: small
        widgets:
          - type: markets
            title: "Watchlist"
            markets:
              - symbol: AAPL
              - symbol: MSFT
              - symbol: TSLA
              - symbol: BTC-USD

      - size: full
        widgets:
          - type: reddit
            title: "r/programming"
            subreddit: programming

          - type: reddit
            title: "r/technology"
            subreddit: technology

And just like that, I get a homepage showing:

• my fresh RSS items
• local weather
• stock prices
• latest Reddit posts

All synced whenever I refresh the page.

Step 4 — Tracking API Status (My Side Projects)

Glance has a custom API widget where you can fetch JSON from a URL and display your own status info.

My simple setup:

- type: custom-api
  title: "Service Status"
  url: "https://my-api/status"
  fields:
    - label: "API"
      path: "api_status"
    - label: "Database"
      path: "db"

This gives me a tiny personal “status page” right inside the dashboard.

Step 5 — Future Plans: iframe Embeds ✨

One of the reasons I chose Glance is that it supports iframe widgets.

That means I can embed:

• Grafana charts
• Analytics dashboards
• Personal project UIs
• Weather radar
• Even websites I check often

Here’s the simplest iframe config:

- type: iframe
  url: "https://example.com"
  height: 500

I’m super excited to wire this up next — it’s going to make my dashboard way more powerful.

Final Thoughts

Glance has quietly become one of my favorite little tools. It turned my scattered digital routine into something calm, centralized, and pleasant.

Building a dashboard that feels personal — powered by the exact feeds and data sources I care about — has made my mornings smoother and my workflow cleaner.

If you’re also someone who checks a mix of RSS, stocks, Reddit, weather, and APIs every day… honestly, give Glance a try. It’s tiny, flexible, and fun to hack on.

If you want, I can also generate: ✨ a multi-page layout ✨ dark/light theme settings ✨ custom CSS ✨ or a full production-ready glance.yml

Just tell me, I’d love to help (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡