Total newbie has electricity monitoring sorted.. Now on to gas..

Hi, so I'm new at this - but have owned an Eon branded CurrentCost ENVI for a few years.. I had it hooked up to a RaspberryPi via it's serial port and the SD Card image "MeasureIt" loaded on there. It made a nice graph of my usage and served it to a local webpage that I could view whilst on the go.

Discovering this website was somewhat of a revelation, so I read up on the internet how to get my CurrentCost data into EmonCMS.

The way I finally settled was via NodeRED.

​I have a flow that reads the RaspberryPi's serial port. Converts the XML from the CurrentCost to  a URL that uploads the data to EnomCMS. Sorted!

Now the gas part.. No so easy. I've got a reed switch that triggers when I use gas. So I have the capability to count pulses. Now I just need to realise it.

Many options presented themselves. Nathan Chantrell's TinyTX.. Martin Harizanov's Funky v2.. These would be tricky for me in truth because my Pi is probably out of 433mhz range of my gas meter.. 

Also both these guys have recently started playing with the ESP8266.. It's a cheap wifi board.. A few months ago people were using it as a way to get their data from Arduinos and such upto the internet.. More recently people have been developing the tools to flash these chips, upload their own sketches and use the boards GPIO pins to read sensors and such. 

I'd like to do this.. Assuming it's feasible.

But I have zero idea where to start.. A starting point would be to ask how does EmonCMS even count pulses? What does the "input" URL look like for a pulse count? Every time the meter pulses does it send a blip? Or should the board connected to sensor store a few blips and upload a batch?

Like I said, very new at this and pointers would be appreciated!

Thanks.