Okay, so I’ve been wanting to get a little more into coding and thought a fun, small project would be a good way to start. I’m a huge Ohio State football fan, so I figured, why not make a countdown clock for the next game? Here’s how I went about it, bumps and all.
Figuring Out the Basics
First, I needed to, you know, actually figure out how to make a clock. I’m not gonna lie, I Googled a bunch. I looked at some basic HTML and JavaScript tutorials, ’cause that seemed like the way to go. I wanted something simple that I could just stick on my desktop or something.
I played around with some example code I found, just trying to get anything to show up. Honestly, it was a lot of copy-pasting and then tweaking things until it looked kinda right.
Getting the Date Right
The biggest thing was figuring out how to get the current date and the date of the next game. I messed with the JavaScript `Date` object. You can make a new `Date` object, and it’ll be set to right now. Pretty neat!
Then, I hard-coded in the date of the next game. I know, I know, it’s not super elegant, but hey, it works for now! I made another `Date` object with the game’s date and time.
The Countdown Part
This was the trickiest bit. I had to find the difference between the two dates. JavaScript gives you the time in milliseconds, which is…a lot of milliseconds. So, I had to do some math (ugh) to convert that into days, hours, minutes, and seconds. I’m pretty sure I messed this up a few times, getting negative numbers and stuff, but eventually, I got it sorted.
- Millisecond calculation was the difficult part.
- I converted the milliseconds to seconds.
- Then I converted seconds into mintues.
- After, minutes into hours.
- Finally, hours to days.
Making It Look Decent
I didn’t want just a jumble of numbers, so I used some basic HTML to format it. Just some `
I found a spot in my HTML to put the countdown, and then used JavaScript to update the text inside those `
The Final Result
It’s not perfect, and it definitely needs some refining. But it works! It’s a simple countdown clock that shows how long until the next Ohio State football game. It’s a fun little project, and I learned a bit about HTML and JavaScript along the way. It’s always a good day for a new project.
