New Year’s Timer is a site that allows you to play videos synced so that something special happens right at midnight on New Year’s Eve. It also allows you to create your own videos timed to ring in the new year at a precise moment. You can publicly post videos you make and browse everyone's public videos on the homepage.
I built New Year’s Timer in response to memes that began in December 2017 that followed the template "If you play this song at xx:xx:xx on New Year's Eve, yyyy will happen right at midnight. Ring in the new year right."
I realized there was no really simple tool to sync videos to exact timed events. New Year’s Timer currently allows any YouTube video to be set to go off at a specific moment in the video.
New Year’s Timer is designed to be a single-page static website using almost entirely vanilla JavaScript. The code extensively utilizes Svelte, a components framework that compiles to plain JavaScript. The size of the unminified code comes out to less than 50kB.
To simulate a server that can store posts and allow voting, I used Reddit’s API. The database is essentially a subreddit (reddit.com/r/NewYearsTimer), which is browsed, posted to, and voted on using the frontend API. Reddit makes it easy to do all of this without the need for a backend server.
The site is hosted for free using Netlify, a static website hosting service. The only cost I incur is the yearly URL registration fee.
Enter2018Right is the only other site I know of built for the same purpose. New Year’s Timer goes a step beyond, allowing users to easily create and share videos within the site. It also features a more functional player interface.
Create an issue or comment on the public GitHub repository. I intend to check it frequently. If you wish to send me a personal message, you can do so at:
Dylan Freedman, a Master’s student in journalism at Stanford with a background in computer science.