For users

My colleagues were running a presentation in front of a larger audience, and I acted as (silent) time keeper in the background, giving them subtle signs to either speed up, slow down or explain something in more detail when I realized that the audience wasn’t following.

I tried different ways: small hand gestures, eye contact, even small hand written signs. But in today’s digital times, there must be a better way.

Presenting to you: coldmonkey.com – a very simple site to bring small bits of information across to someone else. Basically, you open coldmonkey.com on one device (a phone, tablet, computer) and type a short text there. The website will generate a second site with a random URL – use a second device to access that URL and display the text.

So the time keeper (me) accesses coldmonkey.com and updates the text to be displayed if needed, and the presenter (my colleague) has a second mobile somewhere in front of him where he can read the text if needed.

He does not need to do anything on his device; the text will update automatically every two seconds.

If needed, the time keeper can change the background colour of the displayed text to express more (or less) urgency.

This site is free to use, requires no App installation, has no ads and only one cookie (which is the unique random code of the generated page); no marketing ads or similar.

For developers

The site returns the information also as JSON object – when calling the displayjson.php-script, such as:

https://coldmonkey.com/displayjson.php?ac=xV2ikfPafhEUMU2ZzHtebcvvwJp3v3CH

The result will be something like:

header('Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8');
{"text":"This is the text","style":"2","updated":"2023-07-29 21:03:37","accesscode":"xV2ikfPafhEUMU2ZzHtebcvvwJp3v3CH"}

The four returned attributes are:

• text: The defined text.
• style: The defined style which renders as follows on the HTML page:
  • style = 1: background: #FFFFFF; color: #000000;
  • style = 2: background: #00751b; color: #FFFFFF;
  • style = 3: background: #fbff49; color: #000000;
  • style = 4: background: #c90000; color: #FFFFFF;
• updated: Timestamp when the text and style were last updated.
• accesscode: The unique code to access this data; it was also part of the original request.

I would appreciate if someone can build an Android/Apple Watch/Garmin watch face with this information. I suggest to call this script every 3 seconds or so and display the returned text on the watch face. Setting up the original access code on the watch may be a problem; I am happy to build some sort of mechanism which works with a temporary short code as well (check my site Dozilla.io where I have built something similar).