General Purpose Progressbar in Django

Question

I want to make a little web-frontend for copying (rsync) and encoding (ffmpeg) files for my Server using Django.
And I want to keep track of the progress of the processes.

I saw a few jquery-scripts, but they are designed to be used with uploads, and I don't know enough javascript to modify these scripts for my needs.
I want to write a script that retrieves the task status from a textfile and outputs a progressbar, but I've got no idea where to start.

Does somebody know a good tutorial to start with?

And sorry for my poor english.

Answer 1

See the code here http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/679/, it says "upload progress for multipart forms" but there is nothing specfic to forms you can use it anywhere with few tweaks.

General concept is

1. Write a webservice/webpage which can return e.g. JSON info about progress
2. On client side use javascript(ajax) to contact progress API time to time, and using that info update something client side e.g. a text msg, width of an image, color of some div etc