For information on placing your own ads on your Xtgem site see This page

<xt:countdown format="FORMAT" from="NOW 1" to="NOW 2"/>

FORMAT=years months days hours minutes or seconds
NOW 1 and NOW 2= yesterday today tomorrow or a date in mm/dd/yy/ or dd month yy form or a time hh:mm:ss and it seems just about any way you can describe a date or time!

The parser also understands timezone names ie. BST PST UTC etc and things like "last tuesday"!

SO IF IN DOUBT TRY IT IT MIGHT WORK!
for the technical explaination see
http://php.net/strtotime <xt:countdown format="days" from="now" to="25th december"/>

There are 33 days until christmas

You can set a default file to be included if the file does not exist If "foo" does not exist then "bar" is included

Include a random file from a folder of TEXT files
The text files can contain text html tags or scripts
re-load the page to change the included files

You can also do multiple random includes from the same folder
You will have to add an extra operator/argument pair before the file operator
This is to force the random sequence to the next value
It can be anything but x will do

This function will produce a random number between val1 and val2 inclusive

<xt:random from="val1" to="val2" />

Multiple calls on one page
using the same input values
will produce the same output. 1st call 2769
2nd call 2769

To cure this add another operator/argument pair I'm using x
4261
Change the value of x to change the output.
7720
The value of x can be almost anything.
9916

This function returns the url that the visitor came from

local="y" only local urls are returned
default="http://default url" the default url for non supporting browsers or if the page is accessed from the address bar or for off site referer when local is set

This function returns the current url
This XTfunction has 3 parameters which can be combined to give various outputs

The full URL of the pagehttp://tutorial.graham.yn.lt/Hiddenxtfunctions

The path to the page/tutorial/Hiddenxtfunctions

The domain of the sitetutorial.graham.yn.lt

Urlencode the outputhttp%3A%2F%2Ftutorial.graham.yn.lt%2FHiddenxtfunctions

Strip the query string from the outputhttp://tutorial.graham.yn.lt/Hiddenxtfunctions

This function has a output of "web" "mobile" or "touch"
which indicates the type of device accessing the page.

<xt:get_device_template />