The CABlog

Using subdomains in the URL bar to show a song's lyrics as it plays

Hi all,

I bring you another silly idea I built last night because I found it amusing, a website that shows the Lyrics of Flo Rida's "Good Feeling" in the url like so:

oh-sometimes-i-get-a-good-feeling-yeah.lyrics.unmaintained.app

Demo Website - Don't use the above page as it won't work, as it's all orchestrated by the homepage

How did I do this? Originally I built this with the Youtube Player, but the record label prevented me from embedding the video into the production website.

So I switched to the Soundcloud Player. It launches a new tab with the Lyric subdomain, to avoid triggering the Pop-up blocker, it does it the second you click "Start Experience" (which you should do rather than pressing play on the Soundcloud widget - again to avoid Pop-up problems). It keeps a reference to the opened tab (i.e. it does not use noopener) and then checks for the current timestamp in the Soundcloud player, and when it passes a hardcoded timestamp (see the code here) it redirects the tab to a new URL by setting it's location.href property - I tried to use history.pushState, but this doesn't work when navigating across subdomains. I could've totally switched to using URLs but I find it more amusing this way and so I'm leaving it as is.

Demo Website

Hopefully you found this interesting and have a great day ahead,

~ CA

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This post was last edited 4 weeks, 2 days ago.