March Madness is here and and what better way to keep track of the action than with a scoreboard tracker at the bottom of your screen. Check out the image below:

This is accomplished by combining a python script with the conky variable scroll. The python script will get the data, parse it and put it into a acceptable format for conky to handle the display. I’ve talked about conky earlier and using displaying the last instant message.

Copy the following code and save it as bottomscore.py

#!/usr/bin/python import urllib # Open html page fweb = urllib.urlopen("http://scores.espn.go.com/ncb/bottomline/scores") gamestr='' score='' # Manipulate str for unneccessary chars raw=str(fweb.readline()) raw=raw.replace('%20',' '); raw=raw.replace('^',''); raw=raw.replace('&','

') # Open data storage f=open('bottom.dat', 'w') f.write(raw) f.close() f=open('bottom.dat', 'r') # Parse each line, get game, create str, append str for line in f: if line.find('_left')>1: gamestr=line[line.find('=')+1:-1] score= score + gamestr + ' | ' f.close() print score

My conky script is as follows. Save this

#avoid flicker double_buffer yes #own window to run simultanious 2 or more conkys own_window yes own_window_transparent no own_window_type normal own_window_hints undecorate,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager, above #borders draw_borders no border_margin 0 #shades draw_shades no #position gap_x 0 gap_y 0 alignment bottom_middle #behaviour update_interval 1 #colour default_color 8f8f8f #default_shade_color 000000 own_window_colour 262626 text_buffer_size 1400 #font use_xft yes xftfont bauhaus:pixelsize=10 #to prevent window from moving use_spacer none minimum_size 1400 TEXT ${color e0e0e0} ${scroll 2847 ${execpi 60 python ~/scripts/bottomscore.py}}

Remember to edit your .conkyrc to run the right path to bottomscore.py. You may need to edit certain parameters for your screen resolution but this should give you a good start. Any questions, post a comment.

Pro Tip:To run multiple conky screens:”conky -c .conkyrc2″