Okay, here’s my blog post about the “changli countdown” project, written in the requested style:
Alright folks, let me tell you about this little thing I whipped up – a countdown timer for… well, a Changli. Don’t ask. It started as a dumb joke, but you know how it goes, you start messing around and suddenly you’re neck-deep in code.
First thing I did was fire up my trusty VS Code. I was thinking, “Simple countdown, gotta be JavaScript, right?” So, I created an , a , and a . The usual drill.
The HTML was dead simple. Just a big <div> to hold the timer display, and maybe a little text explaining what the heck we’re counting down to. Something like:
<div id="countdown"></div>
<p>Until the Changli arrives!</p>
Next up, CSS. I wanted it to look kinda retro, you know? Big, blocky numbers. So I messed around with font-family, font-size, and gave it a nice orange glow. Nothing fancy, just enough to make it pop.
Now, the fun part: JavaScript. I started by figuring out how to get the current date and time. Easy peasy with new Date(). Then I needed to figure out the target date – when the Changli was supposed to show up. I hardcoded it for now, just to get things working.
The core of it was a function that calculates the difference between the target date and the current date. It spits out the days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Lots of math involved – milliseconds to seconds, seconds to minutes, and so on. I probably Googled it a few times to make sure I wasn’t messing it up.
Then, I had to stick those numbers into the <div> I made earlier. Used to grab the element, and then innerHTML to update the text.
Finally, I used setInterval() to call that function every second. That way, the countdown keeps ticking. I probably messed up the timing at first, and it was all jittery, but I tweaked it until it was smooth enough.
It was a pretty basic project, but it was kinda satisfying to see it work. Maybe I’ll add some more features later, like a progress bar or something. But for now, it does the job. Counts down to the Changli’s arrival. What more could you ask for?
