Icon troubles + countdown in new plasmoid

[Tarah Wheeler]

Hi, all:

I'm new at KDE development.

I'm trying to create a plasmoid which has a custom image (I've saved it to 
/myCustomPlasmoid/icon.png), and a countdown ticker for the text.  

I've gone through the tutorial and gotten the example plasmoid to compile and 
operate properly.  

How do I specify that I want to use my own icon (as opposed to the one in 
KIcon which provides a default document icon) for the image?  I tried using 
the relative directory like this in the .cpp:

    : Plasma::Applet(parent, args),
    m_svg(this),
    m_icon("../icon.png")

But it's not working.  I still get the default document icon instead of my 
custom image.

Second, how would I go about replacing the regular text with a countdown (with 
a prespecified value set in the future)?

If there are any tutorials or walkthroughs other than the beginning one I've 
already done, I'd be glad to know about them.

Thanks!
Tarah