The browser homepage is the page you look at the most when you use your computer, yet it's often not that useful. Aside from quick links to your most visited pages, most browsers just show you a barely-curated news feed or something. Vivaldi does have a heavily customizable page I like a lot, but I wanted to take things to the next level.

That's when I heard of self-hosted dashboards, and Glance in particular. These boards let you create your own custom homepage with all kinds of widgets and useful features, and it's absolutely wonderful. I've only just started using it, but Glance is already a favorite of mine.

Setting up Glance

A little more trouble than necessary

I'm not really a fan of spending too much time trying to figure out something that should be basic, but it happens far too often, and Glance is a good example. I don't know if I can really blame Glance itself because, realistically, it's still easy to set up, but it's not as easy as I was hoping.

Here's the thing: I found Glance on the TrueNAS app repository, and typically, just deploying apps from there works, but in this case, the app always refused to start (even though it was deployed). Instead, I had to create a dataset manually, use Dockge to deploy the Docker container, and also manually download a config file to set up a default homepage.

Now, the config file is how you customize the entire UI, so it's not included by default so users can create their dashboard from scratch if they want to. And it's not like it's a hard process at all if you want to pull the pre-configured page; you can check this page for the basic Docker Compose file in Dockge. It just feels like the TrueNAS listing for the app is misleading since it doesn't actually work.

It's very powerful

Your start page can truly be your own

Once you have a config file, Glance is truly yours to configure, and it's honestly very cool. The start page comprises numerous widgets, and the example configuration file includes a lot of them so you get a good idea of what it can do. The "official" widgets include a calendar, weather, Reddit feeds, YouTube videos from select channels, recent releases from GitHub, and many more.

Personally, I stuck with most of these defaults, only removing things like the stock market tracker. What I did need to do was change the actual content of each widget. By going into the config.yml file, you can change multiple variables for each kind of widget. For example, the calendar widget let me change the beginning of the week to Sunday instead of the default Monday. And weather, of course, let me set my location, as well as the preferred units indicator and time format.

I customized my RSS feed with a couple of NIntendo news sources plus XDA, created a split-column layout with a couple of Reddit communities side-by-side (also focused on Nintendo), changed the YouTube widget to include videos from channels I care about, and also tweaked the GitHub releases widget to feature projects I want to follow more closely. This dashboard lets me centralize many of the things I follow and care about, and it makes it much easier to feel like I'm on top of my digital life.

I also added a couple of widgets, though, including a clock, a to-do list, and a website monitor that lets me know if my other self-hosted services are still accessible. I also added XDA to that list, just in case something ever goes wrong. This is all just using the official widgets from the developers of Glance, but there's a good bit more to it.

You can customize its look, too. Glance comes with a dark and light theme by default, but there are some custom themes on the project's GitHub, and you can just as easily create your own by setting the HSL values for each of the three primary colors.

The community makes it even better

Custom widgets add even more capabilities

If the official widgets aren't enough for you, Glance also supports a wide range of community-created widgets that add even more functionality to the dashboard. A lot of these are made for monitoring certain home lab services I don't use, but there are many others as well. For example, there's an event calendar that can pull events from your Google account and show upcoming ones on your dashboard.

Other interesting ones I found include a seven-day weather widget (the official one only shows forecasts for the current day), GitHub notifications, a status report of my Proxmox nodes, and Steam games currently on sale. There's a lot of cool stuff here, and being able to bring it all together in one place is fantastic.

A lot of these widgets have very complex configuration files, so integrating them into the main config file directly may be a challenge because of the indentation requirements to get everything working. But that's where it gets even cooler: you can create a separate YAML file just for a single widget, and when you want to add it to your page, you can just use $include: configfile.yml. You can use this directly in one of the dashboard's columns or in groups, so you're not limited as to where these custom widgets can be added.

Glance is amazing

I've just gotten started with Glance, but I already don't want to go back to my previous homepage. Glance shows my information from all the places I care about, but it importantly doesn't distract me with things I don't need. Opening Reddit itself is always a rabbit hole, so this way I can just monitor the communities I care about without being bombarded by other content trying to get my attention.

It's such a great way to stay on top of the things I care about without having to go hunt for each of them individually. If you have a NAS or you're otherwise interested in self-hosting, I highly recommend checking this out.