This price ticker queries the Kraken API for the price of the latest trade on the bitcoin/USD pair every 5 seconds.
The code for this website is open source, and I maintain a simpler version of it (with just the ticker, without the about page and the 404) in a 74 lines GitHub gist here. You can download the html file there and run it locally so you don't need to ping this website. An example use case for this would be a Raspberry Pi with a screen displaying the price.
Feel free to download and modify/adjust to your needs, and if you do end up building something cool let me know on twitter!
I'm thunderbiscuit. You can find me on Twitter and GitHub, and I have a small blog here.
I spend most of my free time thinking about and working on the bitcoin project.
New to bitcoin? There are many resources out there to help you learn, but here are two I like: Bitcoin Explained and bitcoin-intro.com.
When you first heard about emails, you probably didn't spend too much time digging into the SMTP protocol before sending your first message. Don't make that mistake with bitcoin! Specifically, note the first two principles of bitcoin-intro.com: