Student Radio Association

The need for a new site

Last year we produced urfonline.com using drupal – because we were constrained by time and rather unsure of what urfonline.com was.After a year of data collection and experience running a student radio website we found a few things:

We also noticed, despite the admin system that was put in place last year – people preferred to communicate without the website and the admin system was being supplemented by each exec members own excel sheets. A reworking of the website was in order.So we sat down with the members and the exec and identified what we wanted the website to be:

We then set about satisfying these requirements

Increasing member participation

The new system, codenamed sunshine, is built from the Ruby On Rails admin system designed last year and so inherits the show and member database. This allows us to provide, with minimal effort, a way to auto generate a schedule and to link member profiles to shows. [see attached screenshot]

Each show now gets it own public page and attached blog. One of the problems last year was that members did not participate in the website – and all the updating was done by the exec team. The addition of a show blog encourages members to keep show notes and post extra content around their show. This, we hope will increase audience participation and more importantly will bring the URF members community closer. The show page is able to contain links to facebook and twitter accounts – an often used promotional tool by student DJ’s.

In addition to show blogs, every post by a user is aggregated into a public facing user page – which gives links to the shows that member does, the contributions they have made over the site and, if the member chooses, their last.fm data. By using this last.fm data we are able to provide one of our more unique features - which is currently in development. A prospective listener is able to go to the website, enter their last.fm username and the system will compare the listening habits of that listener to our member’s database and suggest shows that the listener may enjoy.

Making the URF site useful

One of the significant additions is the inclusion of the music reviews section. When a user posts a review we query the musicbrainz.org service and return the likely artist or release. This serves two purposes – firstly it corrects common mistakes: such as choosing the incorrect spelling of ‘Guns N' Roses’. Secondly, it gives a music brainz id number. We can use this number to query the music brainz servers for more information (like track listings) and other services like last.fm (where we get artist bios and album art) in order to provide a better experience to visitors reading our reviews.

By using data from around the internet in various different ways we are able to achieve the results of a much larger site with a development team of more than two people. We have, in part because of the great usefulness of other API’s, provided a REST api to urfonline.com. The final scheme has not been solidified yet – but is on track to be turned on in September, when we shall invite other student stations to use the data any way they see fit.

Conclusion

http://code.google.com/p/urf-on-rails/ contains most of our production ready code. At time of writing the music reviews and the show sections have been implemented fully – with the last.fm user matching nearing completion. If you would like to keep up with development on project sunshine then do not hesitate to check out the code repository or visit our testing server at http://urf.1steasy.net/. If you would like to try out the admin system, feel free to email us at Daniel@14lines.com.