Silly countdown with jQuery

I hate winter. Just tell me when it’s over, please. I don’t trust foreign and/or unproven sources for this knowledge, so I created something.

Here’s what I used:

• Apache2 and jQuery
• The Final Countdown plugin http://hilios.github.io/jQuery.countdown/

Allocate a folder, example /var/www/html/spring, and download the plugin:

➜ ~ wget -q https://github.com/hilios/jQuery.countdown/releases/download/2.2.0/jquery.countdown-2.2.0.zip
➜ ~ unzip jquery.countdown-2.2.0.zip && cd jquery.countdown-2.2.0
➜ ~ cp jquery.countdown.js /var/www/html/spring

Make sure you have jQuery, too.

Create a file /var/www/html/spring/index.html with the contents below:

Navigate to where you configured your web server to serve this, e.g., http://127.0.0.1/spring. You should see the countdown exactly as shown in the first picture.

But wait, I don’t want to use a web browser…

Oh, of course you don’t. Scrape your site via the CLI. Yes, you could just use a one-liner to calculate the days remaining, but that doesn’t sound very fun to me.

If you’re on a Mac, and using Homebrew, grab PhantomJS from homebrew/cask.

➜ ~ brew tap homebrew/cask
➜ ~ brew install — cask phantomjs

Also, install w3m for later.

➜ ~ brew install w3m

Create a local file ~/save_page.js.

And create wrapper script to call it at ~/spring.sh

Finally, run it:

➜ ~ chmod +x ~/spring.sh
➜ ~ bash ~/spring.sh

Done.

Hopefully, one day a countdown will be desperately needed, and you’ll be prepared.

Mistakes? Did I miss anything? Let me know.