Update: 7-29-2014
For your convenience and to make it easier for you to follow along, I made an E-Book that is free for you to download to your favorite e-reading device.

Download this article in EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and/or WEB formats.

I’ve been using Media Temple for hosting and overall it has been a very pleasant experience. There are some things that are a little inconvenient, especially things like no native support for a Media Temple Amazon S3 backup. You can’t blame Media Temple for that though… it’s mainly a Plesk thing. Fortunately enough, Plesk stays enough out of your way where you can set this up on your own. We can utilize free tools from Amazon to automate backups from MediaTemple DV 4.5 servers.

Update 5-25-2017
We’ve made it even easier for you to style HTML5 audio elements. Amplitude 3 is now available! Download it on GitHub. Check out the Amplitude site for latest documentation and a to see the latest features:

A unique issue presented itself while reviewing some of the comments in the article: http://serversideup.net/style-the-html-5-audio-element/. One of the questions was how to use the audio tag for live streams? The issue wasn’t necessarily playing the music, but getting the music to stop downloading when the user had the music paused (to save bandwidth) and to play from where the current point of the stream was at rather than starting from where the user paused the stream. With the latest release of AmplitudeJS, you can now manage live stream HTML5 audio sources and give you full control of the UI elements of the audio player.

Due to the amount of questions and feedback from http://serversideup.net/style-the-html-5-audio-element/, I’ve decided to create an easy to use library that wraps the existing functions of the HTML 5 audio tag and allows for easy styling. You can customize HTML Audio CSS and the library allows use to easily brand and define the UX of their audio on their website.

With the introduction of HTML 5, the audio tag provides a simple way to play audio files without the use of Adobe Flash. However, with the generic controls attribute, all audio tags look the same, but without any controls defined, the audio tag is invisible. In this tutorial I provide examples and a simple library on interacting with the audio element through Javascript and CSS. This provides the developer the ability to stylize all of the buttons and make a custom UI for the Audio element.

There are times when you prompt your user with two autocomplete input boxes where one depends on the information entered into the first box. For example, the user selects a sport “Basketball” and the second box you choose a team “Milwaukee Bucks”, another could be the first box you select “Football” and the second box autocompletes only NFL football teams. The values that you load in the second box depend on the selection of the first box. There are three options on how to do this: