W-Shadow.com

Recently I decided to take a look at Squidoo and almost immediately I noticed they offered a Module Development Kit. After checking out the list of “Most Wanted” modules it seems a countdown module is a fairly popular idea and should be easy enough to do. A countdown module would basically “count down” to a specified date time, in realtime. I’ve played around with the MDK (I might post about that later) and have already created something approaching a “basic” module.

What I’m planning to do is let the lensmaster specify these options –

Event Date/Time
Currently it’s just a simple text field where you enter the date/time manually. This is the date to count down to. I could probably hook up one of the nice LGPL DHMTL calendars later.

Event Timezone
This info is neccessary because the lensmaster, Squidoo server and the visitor(s) might have different timezones so I need to compensate for that. In most cases you would be able just autodetect the timezone with a click of a button.

Countdown Text
I imagine this as similar to a typical Write Module (basic HTML and such) with some additional tags like {days}, {hours} and so on that the lensmaster can insert where he wants the numbers to be. In it’s current state the tags work but I’m not sure about HTML.

Finished Text
What to show after the date has passed. For additional flexibility I’ve made it so that you can use the tags here, too, and display how much time has passed since the date/time.

Unfortunately I don’t have a demo to show. I’ve written to Squidoo and asked if they’re interested in a module like this; we’ll see how that goes.