What I ended up doing by way of a surrogate is use the RSS feed plugin and set it to a very low refresh (1m) and create a script on a server that automatically creates an RSS file with the remaining minutes as the title of both the channel and the single item in there...
It's not precise (I'd still love a proper countdown plugin) but it will function well enough for my purpose!
The below linux sample script is extremely simple, and not cleaned up, but serves the purpose:
Code: Select all
#!/bin/bash
echo '<?xml version="1.0"?>' > ./countdown.rss
echo '<rss version="2.0">' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '<channel>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '' >> ./countdown.rss
echo -ne '<title>Countdown: ' >> ./countdown.rss
echo -ne "$(date -u --date @$((1448023505 - `date +%s` )) +%H:%M)" >> ./countdown.rss
echo -ne ' left</title>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '<description>This is a countdown timer RSS feed</description>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '<link>http://foo.bar/countdown.rss</link> ' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '<item>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo -ne '<title>Countdown: ' >> ./countdown.rss
echo -ne "$(date -u --date @$((1448023505 - `date +%s` )) +%H:%M)" >> ./countdown.rss
echo -ne ' left</title>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '<description>How much is left?</description>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '<link>http://foo.bar/countdown.rss</link>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '</item>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '</channel>' >> ./countdown.rss
echo '</rss>' >> ./countdown.rss
Run that from crontab every minute, and you've got your countdown RSS feed...