A couple of releases ago the California LoCo team was looking for a way to get a countdown banner to use on the wiki. Since the Wiki didn’t like that javascript or any of the other ways that was offered, I came up with this little hack. Now, it does take a bit of work but, in the end it is kind of nice.
You will need to get either the .png with all of the daily images or, a folder with all of the countdown days.
You will also need space on a webserver.
Take the images and get them to countdown with the name of the file corresponding with the day of the month. If the release is on the 16th then the file 15.png will be the file that says “1 day to go”.
Once you count back all of those upload them to a folder on the webserver.
Now comes the fun part. Edit your .htaccess file in the folder.
We will be using Rewrite to use multiple images with one file name.
Add these three lines to the .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{TIME_DAY} >1
RewriteRule ^.*countdown\.png$ %{TIME_DAY}.png
What this does is redirect the file “countdown.png” and point it to the other files based on day of month.
Hope this works for you as it has for me.
Tags: 10.10, countdown, htaccess, LoCo, maverick, release, rewrite, Ubuntu