How to offer custom countdown clock generator to my users?

[Crazie Cruiser]

Many members of my forums have countdown clocks which are created elsewhere, to help count down the days to their vacation (my site is related to vacations). Often times these countdown clocks have external web urls built into the images, as a form of advertising.

How could I go about hosting my own countdown clock creator for my own users, that they could select from the designs, text to insert onto the clock, and my own website information? Has anyone done this? Having trouble finding via google so hopefully someone here can relate and share some insight.

Thanks!

[palenous]

I might be able to help you out. What kind of back end experience do you have? Is your server running on PHP, .NET, etc.? Do you allow them to embed these in your site? I guess I'm not completely sure what you mean so if you could post a link or example, that would make it much easier to help you out.

[Crazie Cruiser]

Dont have much backend experience. I'm running on a shared linux webhosting service (liquidweb). Sorry yeah an example site would have been helpful. Here's what I'm trying to do - http://www.ucruiser.com/ticker/ and http://www.cruiseclocks.com/

[n_K]

http://php.net/manual/en/book.image.php

There's some examples of how to use PHP_GD there so all you really need to do is say load a few images and place them on top of each other, draw some text over the top and output a PNG

[palenous]

Alright, I see what you mean. Do you have PHP as your backend? I'm a PHP developer primarily, so that would be helpful. Also, you said you would have some preset images for them to choose from like the sites you listed above? To be honest, this wouldn't be too much work, and I'd be glad to help out over the next couple of days or so if you'd like.

[Crazie Cruiser]

@n_K - Thanks for the link but I think I'll need some more help than that.

@palenous, sorry for the delayed response - For some reason the instant email notification setting is not working. Anyways if you would be willing to help, that would be amazing! Yes I have php in the backend. Going to send you a PM!