I put all my daily feeds and server stats on one page, and now I barely open anything else

I have a bad habit of opening the same cluster of sites before I’ve even worked out what I came to the browser for. News feeds, GitHub, YouTube, weather, system information, then whatever side road happens to catch my eye. By the time I’m ready to do anything useful, the tab bar already looks like a small administrative failure.

Glance gave me a much better place to start. It’s a self-hosted dashboard that pulls those routine checks onto one page and lets you decide what actually gets permanent screen space. I replaced most of the sample widgets with ones that matched how I use my PC, and before long, a good chunk of my usual tab-hopping was compressed into one page I could glance at and move on.

Glance expects you to get your hands dirty

YAML is the price of admission

Glance recommends Docker Compose, although it also offers precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS. If containers are already part of your setup, getting started is pretty chill once you install Docker on Windows 10 or 11. I went with the Windows binary for Glance 0.8.6 instead, which was basically a matter of dropping glance.exe beside glance.yml, launching it, and opening localhost:8080 in my browser.

After that, there’s no graphical builder waiting to hold your hand. Glance keeps the layout, widgets, feeds, cache intervals, titles, and most of its behavior inside YAML, which gives you a lot of control but also means indentation can ruin your mood.

I learned that lesson when one stray tab stopped my edited configuration from loading, and running Glance from Command Prompt finally pointed me to the offending line. Fix the spacing, refresh the page, and you’re back in business. Once the structure makes sense, most customization boils down to editing small blocks of YAML, then refreshing the page instead of wrestling with a giant configuration file.

The supplied configuration helps a lot because you’re not staring at a blank page on day one. Glance already ships with widgets for RSS, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, weather, search, software releases, service monitoring, Docker containers, server stats, and plenty more, so the first job is mostly deciding what you have or need to keep.

Every widget had to earn its space

RSS was the easiest place to start because I already had a predictable list of publications I check for work. I replaced the sample feeds with those sources and let Glance combine everything into one stream. The widget supports both RSS and Atom, and options such as limit, collapse-after, and cache control how much appears and how often Glance checks for updates. You can even cap individual feeds, which stops one hyperactive publication from annexing the entire panel.

I replaced the Markets panel with Monitor, which packs quite a bit into a tiny widget. Glance sends a GET request to each configured URL, treats HTTP 200 as healthy by default, and shows the response time alongside the result. You can also define other acceptable status codes, change the timeout, add basic authentication, or use a separate check-url when the page you want to open isn’t the endpoint you actually want Glance testing.

Monitor is still meant for quick availability checks, so you shouldn’t expect it to explain why a service has gone sideways. If DNS starts looking suspicious, for example, a dedicated Windows DNS toolkit for network diagnostics will tell you far more than a green or red status indicator ever could.

The stock release tracker was next to go. Glance can watch releases from GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, and Docker Hub, so I pointed it at software I already keep tabs on. That includes Gopeed, a browser download manager, and NanaZip, a modern 7-Zip alternative for Windows, which saves me from visiting a small procession of repositories just to see whether somebody shipped a new build.

Search made Glance much more useful as my browser starting point. It supports several search engines and custom bangs, so I can create shortcuts that send a query straight to GitHub, YouTube, a publication, or practically any site with a predictable search URL. Pressing S focuses the search box from elsewhere on the page, which cuts out another one of those tiny new-tab detours I apparently make dozens of times a day.

The biggest change was replacing Twitch with Server Stats. When Glance is running on the PC you want to monitor, the widget can show local CPU, memory, and disk usage right on the dashboard. Remote machines can feed into the same panel through Glance Agent, although the developers still describe both Server Stats and the agent as under development.

You’re also not limited to whatever ships with Glance. The official Glance Community Widgets collection has community-built integrations based on custom-api and extension. Smaller ones can often be dropped straight into glance.yml, while chunkier widgets can live in their own YAML files and get pulled into the main config, which keeps the dashboard from turning into one enormous wall of indentation.

The page works better when it stays shallow

Useful beats comprehensive here

Glance fetches most of its data when the page loads, then caches that information for as long as you’ve configured each widget to hold onto it. It isn’t constantly pestering every source in the background, so fresh data usually shows up when you refresh the page. Clocks, relative timestamps, and a few other elements can still update on their own while the dashboard is sitting open.

That cadence works well for the kind of homepage I wanted. Server Stats can tell me when memory usage gets a little suspicious, and from there I can hand the investigation over to a Windows app that tracks resource usage over time. Even Task Manager only tells part of the story when you’re trying to figure out where your RAM is actually going, so I’m perfectly happy letting Glance act as the early warning light instead of pretending it’s a full diagnostic console.

I don’t need Glance to replace the whole web

There’s plenty of room to keep building from there, with multiple pages, Docker status, custom APIs, HTML, iframes, themes, extensions, and custom CSS all available if you want them. I’m deliberately trying not to turn mine into a side project. The whole reason I set up Glance was to open fewer tabs, and if one dashboard saves me from opening five separate sites before I’ve had coffee, it has already earned its keep.