Script to output last 5 status messages from status.gitub.com to be used for example with GeekTool or similar

github_status.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

import urllib, json
from dateutil.parser import parse
from textwrap import wrap

messages_url = 'https://status.github.com/api/messages.json'
data = json.loads(urllib.urlopen(messages_url).read())

status_char = {
    'good' : '+'
  , 'minor' : 'o'
  , 'major' : '-'
}

for message in data[0:5]:
  date = parse(message['created_on'])
  prefix = '[%s][%s] ' % (date.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M %Z'), status_char[message['status']])
  w = '\n%s' % (' ' * len(prefix))
  msg = w.join(wrap(message['body'], 60))

  print '%s%s' % (prefix, msg)