motd.co
tonight.pm
I go to the same restaurant with a group of friends every Tuesday night. The guest list is constantly changing from week to week as people go on vacation or have other engagements, so we never really know how many people will be there on a given night.
Whoever has the unfortunate luck to be the first to arrive at the restaurant is greeted by the beleaguered staff, who know that we will have a large party, with a simple “How many?” and too frequently our response is “um, 8? Maybe 12? No more than 15.”
Instead, we now use tonight.pm, which is a web application I built that lets you create an RSVP list for an event. When you go to any subdomain on that domain name (say poker.tonight.pm or clambake.tonight.pm) and add the first name, it starts a clock which will reset that page 24 hours later. This means that the page is yours to use for one day and anyone you want to direct to that URL can visit it and add their name or see who’s coming and quickly get a count to know exactly how many people have RSVPed.
Within a matter of weeks, we’ve got everyone using it with almost 100% reliability and now have a much more accurate estimate when we get to our Tuesday night spot and are greeted with “How many?”
Thanks to John Holdun for collaborating with me! He spruced up the page and made it look much nicer on iPhone especially. If you have any suggestions for improvement or bug reports, feel free to send me an issue or pull request on the Github repo.