Jefflog

I know it’s not healthy to do, but I watch my stock portfolio go up and down all day long. I’ve got a sidebar with my stocks displayed in my browser, and I can see how much I’ve made or lost today updated every five minutes.

I had gotten to thinking, though, that there’s no reason those quotes couldn’t be auto-updating using the latest AJAX technology. I toyed with the idea of writing my own portfolio tracker using Ruby on Rails, but to be honest I never really had the time to delve into the framework. The idea has been languishing on my hard drive for six months.

Today I noticed that Yahoo has implemented this feature just about everywhere a stock quote is displayed. The Yahoo Finance home page is a good place to start. It’s cool to watch the numbers change on the fly.

Of course, there have been Java applets that could do this for years, but I hate waiting for the Java applet to load not to mention the extra memory it eats up.

My sidebar is still only updating every five minutes, but I may have to see if I can put Yahoo Finance in my sidebar instead.