This help page provides detailed instructions for the following countdown clock tools:
You have a choice between the traditional countdown clock (count down to a date in the future) or a clock which indicates how much time has passed (time elapsed since date in the past).
Enter the year, month and date you want to count down to.
You may use the word "next" instead of a year, to indicate the
next occurrence of the date. For example your birthday or Christmas. When
the countdown ends the clock will automatically start to countdown to the
same date one year later, without having to manually change the year.
You can enter a time, either in 24 hour form (for example as 19:15) or in 12 hour am/pm form (for example as 7:15 pm). Only if a time different from midnight is entered will it show in your countdown clock.
By default timezone is set to local, since many events, such as Christmas and New Year start at many different times depending on the timezone the visitor is in. However if the event happens in a specific timezone, such as New Year in New York, then you should specify the timezone that New York will be in on that day. Similarly the start of a sports event, a concert, a premiere, a solar eclipse, etc. should set the specific timezone that they occur in. If setting a specific timezone, the clock will indicate that.
Attn: When setting a specific timezone be sure to take daylight saving time into account for your target date which in effect may be in a different time zone than the current date (for example in the United States and Europe October 1st is still in daylight saving time but December 24th is not).
This option allows you to choose either the total per time unit, which shows the grand total for each time unit separately (2 days, 67 hours, 4067 minutes or 244050 seconds) or the remainder per time unit, which shows the remaining time in a more traditional fashion (2 days, 1 hour, 17 minutes and 23 seconds).
You can also choose which time units you want to show, you could decide to only show seconds, or just days. When using traditional mode make sure it still makes sense!
If you would like to use a language that is not provided here, send an e-mail to the address at the bottom of this page. Provide the translation into your language for the following words: years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, in their plural and singular forms, the names of the days of the week and the names of the months. See the overview of currently supported languages for more details.
A special thank you to all who have provided a translation for the countdown clock.
You can set your own title but avoid making it too long, as long titles do not look very nice. Additionally you can change the background color (default is light blue) and chose not to have a border around the frame by unticking the box marked "Frame Border".
There are basically two ways to set the background color,
either by entering the RGB code, for example #FF0000,
or by using so-called named colors such as red.
Make sure to add the # when providing an RGB code.
After filling in all the details click on the Generate iFrame Code or Generate Pop-up Code button. The HTML code will appear in the text box below the form, just copy and paste the text into your homepage and you are done.
However some community sites, like MySpace, do not allow adding iframes or JavaScript, in those cases a link is the only solution. That can be done by using the Generate Raw URL button or the Generate W3C URL button (for a W3C compliant URL).
The countdown clock uses JavaScript. Hence it will run on the vast majority of present day browsers without any special effort by the visitor (no plugins, no Flash, no Java).
The time spent to develop the countdown clock and the bandwidth to deliver it is being given away for free. Because the clock is included on the pages of others, like yourself, it has been made available without any obnoxious commercial advertisement. All the so-called "ad-space" has, for the foreseeable, future been donated to promote high quality open source products that are of actual value to visitors of your website, such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.
The countdown clock uses the client computer's time setting. In other words it will be as accurate or inaccurate as the time indicated by your own computer.
Anyone can put a countdown on their webpage and we have no control over the contents of webpages where the countdown clock appears, nor over the actual countdown that people have created. The fact that a countdown appears on a webpages can never be interpreted to mean any form of endorsement on our part of either the website containing the countdown or the particular countdown they have created.
Because the countdown clock is made available to you free of charge, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. The countdown clock is made available "as is" without any warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied fitness for any particular purpose.
The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the countdown clock is with you. Should the countdown clock prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.
Please also note that there is no obligation on our part to provide you with unpaid support. You can ask questions in the forum and we do our best, within reason and available time, to answer any reasonable enquiry, but there is absolutely NO obligation for us to do so.
The first countdown clock was published on my homepage in 1995. It was a millennium countdown clock. A copy of the original millennium countdown clock is still online and now counts down to the year 3000!
When interest in the millennium countdown clock inevitably waned with the onset of the new millennium a new countdown clock was created that lets its users count down to a date of their choice. This is what is now called the Changeable Date Countdown Clock.
A little later this concept was expanded to let webmasters and bloggers fix the date that the clock is to countdown to and include it into their webpage or blog. That is what has now become the popular Countdown Clock.
Since 1995, the capabilities of browsers have improved dramatically, allowing for example to change pages on the fly, which is what is used to set the title of the clock and change the texts according to the chosen language. The code is regularly reviewed and improved, with new features being added from time to time.
If, after reading this help page, you still have problems or questions, please visit the Countdown Clock Forum on Google Groups.
There are many browsers and platforms, things do not work the same way for all. I have done my best to make it as compatible as possible but if you still find problems or errors please report them to me.
otto2003(at)de-voogd(dot)com
All software by Otto de Voogd.
