Last month, I completed a major overhaul of the British Earways website. The design by Valerio di Lucente of Julia is almost entirely unchanged, the adjustments were largely performance-related and under the hood, geared towards modern browsers. Here’s brief rundown of the changes:

• Style the full-window player layouts using CSS Grid Layout + 100% height (not 100vh since that can lead to unexpected behaviour on mobile browsers), and use CSS Scroll Snap w/ polyfill for scroll behaviour
• Achieve flexible typography and spacing with “CSS Locks”
• On non-touch screens, implement invisible DragDealer instances so that each player’s scrubber can be dragged
• On touch screens, add click event listeners that advance the relevant scrubber to the click target
• Use styled HTML5 progress elements for each player since these are easily manipulated via their max and value attributes and don’t require adjustment if the window is resized
• Use the Web Audio API to initialise each audio file and trigger the necessary state changes as the time updates
• Switch the audio preload attribute from auto to metadata to reduce the size of the page when it initially loads
• Update CMS to Kirby 3 (this was a joy, IMO the panel layout options make v3 much more client-friendly)
• Adjust post_max_size, memory_limit, max_execution_time, and upload_max_filesize to allow upload of large (150MB+) audio files

I ran in to one issue that isn’t yet resolved. Kirby copies all uploaded media from the private /content folder to the publicly-accessible /media folder. This copying normally happens almost instantly, even with very large files. On the BE site however, the copy is pretty slow. Since the site pulls the audio duration from the audio file itself via the Web Audio API, the displayed duration is incorrect until the file has finished copying. This is almost certainly related to some rate limiting done by the shared hosting company, a legacy from the preexisting site. It isn’t a huge deal since the copying always finishes eventually, but it isn’t the best behaviour. I’d like to raise the issue with the hosting company but don’t have high hopes, shared hosting providers use rate limiting for a reason.

At any rate, I’m really looking forward to seeing how DB uses the site over the next year and listening to the new mixes.