I have been looking the last couple of days for a good progress widget for my blog. I saw what Financial Freedumb & Brownie did on their site and liked it but couldn’t find a widget to do it (theirs is hand coded I later found out). I wanted to be able to track it in the database without me having to get out the calculator every time the value changed. I then came across the one that Stine Schjerning did, which is a widget that uses the database but it just tracks an arbitrary percentage that you supply.

Well, being a software developer, I promptly took the layout of the first and combined it with the admin capability of the second. I removed the field for entering the percentage and instead put in a field for the starting value, ending value and current value and let the code do the calculating for me. The end result you can obviously see on the top right of my page (as of this writing).

After I got the initial one done, I quickly added a feature to ‘count down’ with. So you can say track debt reduction (going from X to zero) as well as ‘count up’ (going from 0 to 1 million in savings or whatever). I will most like be making small adjustments in the next few days as I get to play with it, but so far so good. If anyone has any ideas or would like it, let me know.