I'm excited to announce that you can now upload almost any data you want into one of four custom data widgets.  That's right, instead of waiting for us to integrate every service you use (which we want to in the fullness of time) you can just do it yourself!  With a little scripting knowledge you can see data from any service with an API on your Geckoboard status board.  But the possibilities don't end there, you can also free up data locked inside your own databases or bespoke applications for display on your status board.

Find out more about the Geckoboard Custom Data Widgets API in the API documentation which also contains example scripts to get you started quickly.  

One Geckoboard user who has already done just that is @steveWINton (Steve Winton) who wanted a couple of social media widgets that Geckoboard does not have (Twitter follower count and Facebook fan count).  Not only did Steve go out and build them for himself, he's also made them available to all Geckoboard users (no coding required) - you can see Steve's instructions at http://j.mp/geckowidgets.

That's not all we've been up to since the last update, more highlights from the past couple of weeks include:

• Google Apps Email support
• Google Apps Calendar support
• GitHub support
• "All Projects" view of Basecamp milestones & to-dos
• A raft of bug fixes and minor enhancements
• Some changes to streamline the addition of widgets
• Titles for clocks and limited Daylight Savings support
• Bigger text boxes

We're just getting into our stride and have many more integrations and improvements being actively developed and yet more in the pipeline.  The one I'm looking forward to most in the coming few days is Foursquare widgets; location information should suit a status board well I think!

As ever, a huge thank you to all our beta testers whose patience and generosity is really driving the product forward.  If there's something you're desperate to see on your status board please drop by the Feature Request forum and let us know, or why not try plugging it into a custom data widget yourself? :)

We've had lots of suggestions for new widgets since we started the private beta a couple of weeks ago (you'll find most of them over in the Feature Requests forum of the supports site), but by far the most requested and voted for feature is the ability to add a Google Calendar widget.  Well, I'm happy to tell you that this is now available.  Starting right now you can connect to your Google Calendar and have it displayed right there, on your dashboard.  You'll find it under the "Misc" category when you add a widget.

But the good news doesn't stop there because the Google Calendar widget wasn't the only thing we released, we've squashed some bugs and thrown in a couple of enhancements including:

• Enabled some caching which means your Dashboard should load quicker
• The option to include daylight savings on your Clock widget
• Millions of pageviews in the Google Analytics now render nicely instead of trailing off the screen

That's about it for now but we're working hard away on more enhancements including a rather special new feature that I think you're going to love.  I'll have more on that later but for now I can tell you that it's going to blow your minds and it's on track to be released next week.  You'll hear about it first here, on the Geckoboard blog, so why not subscribe?