Fusion Radio
A little history of my part in Fusion for the uninitiated... In first year, I signed up to do tech stuff for Fusion. Leo Currie, the then station manager, asked me whether I could sort out some website stuff.
I ended up redesigning the website - well, re-implementing, really: the look stayed the same, but I tidied up a lot of the rather crazy nested-tabled HTML and designed a lot of incidental graphics. I also created a forum theme to match the site and whipped up a content management system in PHP that basically added a news/reviews posting system and additional permissions system to PHPBB's user database.
Fusion was originally a proper radio station that broadcast on FM for about half the year. When I joined, Leo had just taken over management of the station from someone else, and had decided to webcast rather than FM broadcasting, which would save a lot of money - FM licenses aren't cheap.
Anyway, while I was coding up the Fusion site, Leo was theoretically working on the back-end, hooking the existing studio equipment into a sort of smart automated webcast radio application. It sounded great.
Anyway, a couple of weeks later, after some intense all-night coding sessions followed by dreaming in PHP, I had finished most of the site and was just waiting on the radio side of things to be organised. I emailed Leo to ask him when things would be done, and what the status of the Fusion project was. All I got was a "sometime soon".
Sometime eventually soon turned into "hopefully before Christmas", then into "sorry, I'm really busy right now with exams" and finally into silence.
In the meantime, the site was live on fusionradio.org and I eventually started getting emails from people wondering what was up with Fusion, since my email address was listed under the 'Contacts' section. Originally I replied to each one saying "Sorry, Fusion doesn't actually exist yet ... come back in a bit." and forwarded it to Leo. After several months I stopped replying and just forwarded them; eventually I just started ignoring the messages.
It was around this time that I got annoyed with my contact details being on the website, since I was totally in the dark over Fusion and was in no position to reply to any of the emails. I tried to edit the site page with my email address, using the content management system, only to find that somehow the scripts powering it had succumbed to bit rot and no longer worked properly. I fired up my FTP program to log into the server and try and diagnose what was wrong, and quickly discovered that the server password had been changed.
By this time I hadn't heard from Leo for about a year. I'd got an email from the Union Comms & Marketing a while back, so I put up a news item (I still had a valid personal login for the CMS) saying "Please email this address, and not me!" The steady trickle of emails about Fusion eventually dropped off, and I pretty much marked the project down as a no-go: a bit of a waste of my time and effort, but useful nonetheless, as it had been my first big PHP project, and taught me an awful lot about the language.
Anyway, a week ago, Blair (I still don't know his last name) sent out an email to about fifty people who'd registered as being interested in Fusion at one point or another. I replied, saying that I was interested in seeing the project back up and running, since I had a mostly-working website here still waiting to be pressed into use.
So I went into Uni today to meet Blair to discuss Fusion. I'd gone to bed the night before at 7am and gotten up at 9am, so I was kinda tired. Met him on level 7 of the Union and wandered down to the food court.
We sat for about five minutes and discussed various stuff, then headed back up again to the media suite on level 7, where I gave him a quick tour of the website, such as it is. Turns out fusionradio.org belongs to one Chris Monachan in Cambridge. The hosting for the current website is somewhere in the US. There's also a www.fusion.strath.ac.uk which just points to fusionradio.org.
So the current plan of action is something like the following:
- Get hosting for the website
- Get Uni IT Services to redirect www.fusion.strath.ac.uk to new hosting
- Set up streaming servers and studio
- Start broadcasting
Regarding the first point, there appears to be a possibility that GeekSoc could host the website - they maintain a couple of racks of servers within the Uni, connected to the CIS network, which in turn is connected to the main Uni network. All I need is a server with PHP and MySQL installed, then I can work on repairing the CMS scripts and get the site operational again.
I'm not sure whether I'm meant to be handling the issue of getting the subdomain reassigned, or Blair is.
For the third point, apparently some guy named Rob from the main Uni IT Services is coming down to set up the streaming server, hook it into the Uni network, and get all the streaming stuff set up. I've never met this guy and I have no idea how any of it's going to be set up, what format we're going to be streaming in, or anything. I also don't know if or why we need external website hosting if we're going to have servers hooked into the Uni network.
Also, part of the budget is apparently earmarked to buy two new machines. Given that the total budget for this year is £550, and £100 of that has already gone on enough CD racks to store the several hundred CDs that were taking over the floor and tables of the studio, money may be a bit tight. I offered to donate one of my machines (the last remaining P500 I got from the surgery), but Blair wasn't sure on the specs, so he noted them down to show to the aforementioned IT guy. I don't know whether these new machines are meant to be the servers, or for programme arrangement, or whatever...
For the fourth point, apparently some guys on a media course at another Uni (not sure if it's Glasgow Caledonian Uni or some other Uni) have agreed to come down and set up audio stuff and so on for us, provided they can use the room for practise. The plan is for them to record half-hour filler programmes which can be slipped in between longer DJ sessions or programmes made by local staff.
Anyway ... here's hoping that something actually happens this time round, and I don't get left out in the cold like last time...
I ended up redesigning the website - well, re-implementing, really: the look stayed the same, but I tidied up a lot of the rather crazy nested-tabled HTML and designed a lot of incidental graphics. I also created a forum theme to match the site and whipped up a content management system in PHP that basically added a news/reviews posting system and additional permissions system to PHPBB's user database.
Fusion was originally a proper radio station that broadcast on FM for about half the year. When I joined, Leo had just taken over management of the station from someone else, and had decided to webcast rather than FM broadcasting, which would save a lot of money - FM licenses aren't cheap.
Anyway, while I was coding up the Fusion site, Leo was theoretically working on the back-end, hooking the existing studio equipment into a sort of smart automated webcast radio application. It sounded great.
Anyway, a couple of weeks later, after some intense all-night coding sessions followed by dreaming in PHP, I had finished most of the site and was just waiting on the radio side of things to be organised. I emailed Leo to ask him when things would be done, and what the status of the Fusion project was. All I got was a "sometime soon".
Sometime eventually soon turned into "hopefully before Christmas", then into "sorry, I'm really busy right now with exams" and finally into silence.
In the meantime, the site was live on fusionradio.org and I eventually started getting emails from people wondering what was up with Fusion, since my email address was listed under the 'Contacts' section. Originally I replied to each one saying "Sorry, Fusion doesn't actually exist yet ... come back in a bit." and forwarded it to Leo. After several months I stopped replying and just forwarded them; eventually I just started ignoring the messages.
It was around this time that I got annoyed with my contact details being on the website, since I was totally in the dark over Fusion and was in no position to reply to any of the emails. I tried to edit the site page with my email address, using the content management system, only to find that somehow the scripts powering it had succumbed to bit rot and no longer worked properly. I fired up my FTP program to log into the server and try and diagnose what was wrong, and quickly discovered that the server password had been changed.
By this time I hadn't heard from Leo for about a year. I'd got an email from the Union Comms & Marketing a while back, so I put up a news item (I still had a valid personal login for the CMS) saying "Please email this address, and not me!" The steady trickle of emails about Fusion eventually dropped off, and I pretty much marked the project down as a no-go: a bit of a waste of my time and effort, but useful nonetheless, as it had been my first big PHP project, and taught me an awful lot about the language.
Anyway, a week ago, Blair (I still don't know his last name) sent out an email to about fifty people who'd registered as being interested in Fusion at one point or another. I replied, saying that I was interested in seeing the project back up and running, since I had a mostly-working website here still waiting to be pressed into use.
So I went into Uni today to meet Blair to discuss Fusion. I'd gone to bed the night before at 7am and gotten up at 9am, so I was kinda tired. Met him on level 7 of the Union and wandered down to the food court.
We sat for about five minutes and discussed various stuff, then headed back up again to the media suite on level 7, where I gave him a quick tour of the website, such as it is. Turns out fusionradio.org belongs to one Chris Monachan in Cambridge. The hosting for the current website is somewhere in the US. There's also a www.fusion.strath.ac.uk which just points to fusionradio.org.
So the current plan of action is something like the following:
- Get hosting for the website
- Get Uni IT Services to redirect www.fusion.strath.ac.uk to new hosting
- Set up streaming servers and studio
- Start broadcasting
Regarding the first point, there appears to be a possibility that GeekSoc could host the website - they maintain a couple of racks of servers within the Uni, connected to the CIS network, which in turn is connected to the main Uni network. All I need is a server with PHP and MySQL installed, then I can work on repairing the CMS scripts and get the site operational again.
I'm not sure whether I'm meant to be handling the issue of getting the subdomain reassigned, or Blair is.
For the third point, apparently some guy named Rob from the main Uni IT Services is coming down to set up the streaming server, hook it into the Uni network, and get all the streaming stuff set up. I've never met this guy and I have no idea how any of it's going to be set up, what format we're going to be streaming in, or anything. I also don't know if or why we need external website hosting if we're going to have servers hooked into the Uni network.
Also, part of the budget is apparently earmarked to buy two new machines. Given that the total budget for this year is £550, and £100 of that has already gone on enough CD racks to store the several hundred CDs that were taking over the floor and tables of the studio, money may be a bit tight. I offered to donate one of my machines (the last remaining P500 I got from the surgery), but Blair wasn't sure on the specs, so he noted them down to show to the aforementioned IT guy. I don't know whether these new machines are meant to be the servers, or for programme arrangement, or whatever...
For the fourth point, apparently some guys on a media course at another Uni (not sure if it's Glasgow Caledonian Uni or some other Uni) have agreed to come down and set up audio stuff and so on for us, provided they can use the room for practise. The plan is for them to record half-hour filler programmes which can be slipped in between longer DJ sessions or programmes made by local staff.
Anyway ... here's hoping that something actually happens this time round, and I don't get left out in the cold like last time...