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Geckoboard and Google App Engine = Awesome!

So I've just completed my first Google App Engine python app....I can't begin to say how awesome App Engine is...I had the python and Google Apps SDK installed and a Hello World app deployed onto world class infrastructure in about 20 mins flat. Deployment, simple! Management, simple! Python coding...not so simple (yet!).

So after seeing how awesome it was I put it to good use and implemented an idea I had for the Geckoboard Number widget - a day countdown. I've already implemented this in MonitorWang so if you use this (does anybody? I've had nearly 200 downloads but not a single comment about it, not a single one, good, bad or indifferent!) you can plug your Geckoboard into that.

However a conversation with Hugo the other day piqued my interest in Google App Engine and this seemed the ideal thing to use it for.

Very simply you put the date to countdown to on the querystring and it returns the Geckoboard Number widget XML containing the number of days to go. This means you can add a widget with the number of days remaining to an important or milestone date - the example shown is "Days to Xmas" and this number should countdown everyday.

The url for your number widget is,

http://geckocountdown.appspot.com/?date=2010-12-25&tz=0

Where the date querystring param must be in the format yyyy-mm-dd and the tz param is your timezone offset in hours from GMT - this ensures that the number of days change at the correct time.

Enjoy! I'll be watching.....mwahhhaahaaahha - the mighty Google App Engine Dashboard will give me all the stats I need to see if you are using it! The free account is good for c. 5 MILLION, yes, MILLION hits a month so please don't be shy!
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Richard Morrison said…
Just started using this at Owlstone - a good idea!
28 Mar 2012, 12:40:00
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