Steve and Sam's Blog

For an interesting little experiment, I decided to make a little web page that counts down the release to Steam games. What makes it that bit more interesting is that it also gives you the option to launch the game as soon as it’s released.

The principle behind it is pretty simple. It gets the countdown from the Steam store page and uses it to calculate the release time, this is then stored in a database so it doesn’t have to scrape the Steam store page again. Then the countdown is calculated client side with Javascript and the page doesn’t need to be refreshed and doesn’t use any AJAX so it’s not constantly sending traffic to my server.

The only disadvantage with the current version of this is that it only uses release dates and app IDs that are accessible from the server’s territory. My server is located in Jacksonville, Florida so it will use the US storefront’s content.

If you want to give this a try you can see the countdown for Borderlands or Left 4 Dead 2. Want to see another game’s countodown? Append ?game=<appid> to the end of the URL.

The only problem I find with using Wordpress is finding a theme I like. There are so many themes but why are only a select few appealing to the eye? Being specific in your search makes it even worse.

After a careful few minutes, I have decided on this one. If you find anything better, please let me know.

EDIT: Changed it, it is over the top.