My Friday's Accomplishment

It take some work and some luck to make some of the things on this blog work. The luck is that I usually can find the coding I want somewhere online for whatever I'm needing - the menu above, the ticker above, et cetera - and the work comes in tweaking it for what I want it to display. Once you've got everything set, it feels good to say "I did that" and own it. The frustration, however, is figuring out how some stuff works when you're an amateur coder. Things don't always go as planned and, occasionally, you find yourself scrapping an idea altogether before it even makes it onto the webpage.

Today's example is exactly one of those situations. I've been trying to figure out how to add a custom soundboard to this blog for use on The Hockey Show. Most soundboards are made with Flash, but there has been an increasing push-back from a number of places due to Flash's ongoing problems with stability. Apple, for example, supports no Flash applications whatsoever, so I was already facing the problem that the soundboard would be unusable on any iDevice.

When using Windows, I'm a loyal Firefox guy. I have Chrome and Internet Explorer for testing my blog's creations on those two browsers, but I write and code in Firefox on this blog. News broke earlier this month that Firefox will automatically block Flash without warning you due to a major vulnerability.

Suddenly, that soundboard was looking like a dream from a decade ago when Flash was still hip and fun for videos and software. Learning bits and pieces of Flash along the way is basically all for naught now. Needless to say, I had to find another alternative.

I'm not the world's greatest coder by any means, but I get HTML. It's a common language across all web browsers, and it works well when written well. With that in mind, I went and found some basic code for a soundboard and then I programmed it how I wanted it.

Here's the ongoing project!

As you can see, I've got some sound bytes and sound effects already programmed into the soundboard. What we at The Hockey Show are looking for are additional sounds that you think would fit into hockey discussions and/or snippets of music that can be played in key moments. We'll take all suggestions into consideration, so please suggest an idea if you can!

If you want to find the soundboard quickly, it's located up under the "Extras" menu. Feel free to use it if you like for whatever purpose you may need it. It works on all browsers on all devices - PCs, Android, iDevices - as far as I can tell, and it seems to work through all the major browsers that I could find.

The Hockey Show will have its own unique sound effects now, and you can influence additional choices with your ideas since this blog is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Drop ideas in the comments, and we'll see what we can do with your suggestions!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!