About

This started as a single web page with smashed together code because I (eartharoid) wanted something pretty to put on my 7" Raspberry Pi touchscreen. The Christmas Countdown website now has thousands of visitors and the bot has been added to over 10,000 servers.

History

2017

The CountdownToXMAS (countdowntoxmas.tk) website was released. It featured copy-and-pasted jQuery code and it sucked, but looked nice.

2018

The orginal Christmas Countdown Discord bot was released in November with the Santa hat icon. It was a single JavaScript file. The website got a couple of new pages, which were white text on a dark blue background.

2019

Version 2 of the Discord bot was released, with not many new features, but "better" code. Version 2 of the website was developed but never released. The bot and website got a new Santa logo, and the website was renamed to Christmas Countdown (christmascountdown.live).

2020

In the first week of September development started on v3 of the Discord bot, which was released on October 24th. The bot was completely rewritten and had new features, including translations and much needed timezone support for users and servers. Work on the new website started the day after the bot was released.

2021

In early October, the Discord bot was rewritten for the third time. The v4 Discord bot was released in the week before Halloween, with Discord's slash commands, some new features (including Secret Santa, Santa Tracker, and jokes), and general user improvements. The new Svelte and TailwindCSS website was released less than 3 weeks later.

2022

Minor improvements to the Discord bot, and a new voice channel countdown widget. Christmas Countdown RPC is released in June.

2023

On 6th December, the Discord bot finally passed 10,000 servers for the first time (or maybe the second?), and very nearly reached 11,000 (10,980).