DataFarts - Bad Name, Cool Tool

At last week's CUGOS, Aaron Racicot showed off a few cool things that he'd come across over the past month.

One of which was DataFart. Okay, it's a bad name. A horrible name. But it's actually a pretty great idea and so easy to set up. In the site's own words, "DataFart lets you easily graph data from the command line." It's essentially an API end-point to pipe your data to. It returns a URL which presents your data graphed via D3.js, turning this:

1.0 2.61 3.1
1.2 2.11 4.8
2.1 3.40 5.2

into this:

Best off, it's really nothing more than a terminal command:

cat somedata.txt | curl --data-binary @- datafart.com

Installation, so-to-speak, is nothing more than an alias in your .bash_profile:

alias datafart='curl --data-binary @- datafart.com'

For extra points, I append the command with xargs open (for Mac OS) or xargs gnome-open (for Ubuntu) to have the returned URL automatically open in your default browser:

alias datafart='curl --data-binary @- datafart.com | xargs open'

Discussion, links, and tweets

You can find me on Github under the username alukach, rarely tweeting as anthonylukach, lurking in the #cugos channel on IRC's Freenode network under the name anth0ny, or by old-fashioned email at anthonylukach@gmail.com.