Cleaned up Station Editor

Moss doesn’t grow under my feet when I’m motivated. This screen will look somewhat familiar to WesternMA, but probably not anyone else who still reads the blog.

This screen should now be functional – while I generally dislike Frames, it works well for this purpose – the right side automatically tries to load the URL for the station. That allows you to copy paste URLs from the actual page into the database (normally right click Copy Link Location – wording is browser dependant) and Ctrl + V to past it into the station editor. If you’re using touch screen like an iPad, the process is slightly different by holding down the link to copy then paste. Because it tends to crash the browser and consume massive bandwidth, the right side does not automatically load on mobile devices.

For anyone who wants to give it a go.

There are three levels (currently) of volunteers
1) New Volunteers who shouldn’t be trusted with sharp edged knives yet :),
2) Trusted Volunteers who know their way around and are not likely to create problems and/or do things to provoke me and demand that I argue with you to defend what I’m doing and why, and
3) Me.

This is the New Volunteer screen – on it new volunteers should be able to: (unless I broke it!)
– update the web station’s URL
– change the station format
– Research the station (the line that starts with Google)
– Change the Facebook link (it is “found” automatically, but can be wrong)
– add a comment to the history [like explaining why you did something odd)
– add/change schedule URLs

There are 3 main ways radio stations organize their schedules:
– They put the entire week on one page
– They put weekdays on one page, and weekends on a second page
– They put Weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays on three separate pages
the three URLS are for those three ways
– if the station has everything on one page, put it in Schedule, and leave the other 2 blank
– if the station has a “weekend” page with Saturday and Sunday, put the Weekend URL in the 2nd place
– If the stations splits Weekends, put the Saturday link in Weekend, and the Sunday link in Sunday

Maintaining links to schedules is very lower priority, but if it makes you feel good, go ahead and do it 🙂

Sports Affiliations lists the Sporting Events the station is believed to carry. There is little to no reason to look at that or to try to fix it – unless you’re really into sports and feel a need – most sports are not streamed, so all it does is explains why the stream is down during the NASCAR race or baseball game
You can also set the syndicator. The drop down list shows the probable choices first – so if it’s a sports talk station, you’ll see ESPN, Fox Sports, Yahoo, CBS Sports, etc…

There are 5 steps to get to this point:

1) Create an account if you don’t have one Registration and verify the account
2) Volunteer (the page is from 2007) Volunteer
(mainly just agreeing that this isn’t a paid job)
3) Go to the Needs review page
4) Click on the E inside the yellow box to pull up the station editor if something needs to be fixed
5) Update the information

If you changed the URL, you can reload the entire web page, and it should then reload the updated web page to make sure what you did was correct.

Each change you make sends me an email so I can double check that you aren’t a “terrorist” from the TEA party trying to suppress those progressives! In the beginning is when you’re most likely to get a note from me. It is REALLY important that you check the email on the account you used to register as a volunteer. If you are doing something that needs improvement and you used a “junk email” throwaway account to block spam – and don’t respond in a reasonable time or you’re doing the Clear Clear Clear as fast as I can routine, I’ll eventually revoke your volunteer status to get your attention.

After a while, if you get spunky, you pull down that list box that says Select Group – instead of showing you things detected by the automated scanner, you can look at other things like Country Music Stations, Stations with No Stream, Stations without a Facebook Link, Low Power FMs (Power to the people, right on!)

It only takes a minute or two to create a new dropdown choice if you have some special request.

On my to do list (maybe tomorrow) is to add filters by Station Type and State, and add the ability to ignore an item you don’t want to or are unable to fix.

Note that once you become a volunteer, the streaming buttons return – but they are not reliable and not visible to non-volunteers. If the web sites updates get caught up, I’ll revisit the idea – but we still have the problem of the diversity of mobile streaming devices making desktop streaming links somewhat unimportant and I don’t currently know how to launch most apps on your phone/tablet, and a lot of streams still just don’t work on them..