Okay, so I’ve been totally hyped for the new Honkai: Star Rail update, and I wanted a cool way to count down the days. So I thought, “Why not build my own little countdown timer?” I’m no coding expert, but I like messing around with this stuff.
First, I needed to figure out the release date. Luckily, that was easy enough to find with a quick search.
Getting Started
Then, I needed something to, you know, actually make the timer. I figured HTML, CSS, and JavaScript would be the easiest way to go, since I have some really basic knowledge in it.
- HTML: This is, for the basic structure of the countdown. It has a place to display the days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
- CSS:I use this to make it look not awful. Just some basic styling to center everything and choose some colors.
- JavaScript: This is where the magic happens. It’s the part that actually calculates the time remaining and updates the display.
The Process
I started by creating three files: , , and . Classic, right?
In the , I made some simple <div> elements to hold the numbers for the countdown. Each one got a unique ID so I can target them with the Javascript later.
Then, in , I just centered everything, picked a nice font (I went with something space-y), and made the numbers big and bold. I do not want to make the style very hard, so a simple look is OK for me!
Now for the – this was the trickiest part. I’m not going to lie, I had to look up a few things online. Basically, I did these:
- Got the release date and converted it into a JavaScript date object.
- Got the current date and time, also as a date object.
- Subtracted the current date from the release date to get the difference in milliseconds.
- Used some math (the scary part!) to convert those milliseconds into days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
I totally used a simple math formula, copy and past.
- Made a function that updates the HTML elements with the calculated values.
- Used
setIntervalto call that function every second, so the countdown updates in real-time.
Final Result
It took a bit of trial and error, and a lot of refreshing the page, but it worked! It’s not the fanciest thing in the world, but it’s my countdown timer, and it does exactly what I wanted. And the important thing is I build it by myself!
It’s always fun to build something, even if it’s small, from scratch. Makes you feel like a real tech wizard, even if you’re just copy-pasting code snippets from the internet (don’t tell anyone!). Now every time I look at it, I get even more excited for the Star Rail update!
