Working to a better Future, going over the awesome Past

This last week or so has been pretty interesting, to say the least. We hit over 10,000 unique listeners this week, which was my goal for the month! Hopefully we can shatter that record next month, but for now I'm just happy that listener-ship seems to be trending upwards. I still havent gotten around to adding images or artwork to the main website, but thats mainly because school work has been keeping me from developing the website more than it has been already. I'm still working on getting a promo up both on the stream and on youtube. I suppose I should put that on the Facebook page and the Twitter too, but trying to keep all this social media straight is like, completely impossible.

To explain that image just a little bit, that is the tracking graph for my monthly listeners, but only when I am streaming. That means that any time which the other DJs are responsible for are not reflected by this graph. I wish that I had a way to track all of the listeners regardless of who had control of the stream, but I guess I will have to figure that out over time. For now, this should give a pretty accurate picture of how many people we have listening and for about how long. As you can see, the month is hardly over yet and already I've logged up about 3,000 hours of TTSL (total time spent listening). This counter works similarly to the way one would count man-hours. You listen for three hours and I listen for three hours and the counter will log six hours TTSL. As a basic over-view, thats how that counter works. I think the amount of time spent listening to my music and horrible voice is absolutely fantastic and I never thought it would add up to be as much as it does.

On the side of the planning for the future, I have yet to start designing a club in Second Life for the station, and I'm sort of starting to think that it might be a waste of time to build. Honestly, even when I was playing SL on a normal basis, I was still only there for a few hours at a time and building a support structure in-game would be a pain in the ass. I would need someone to staff the club at all hours of the day, which means I'd really need at least three people for that, then 'd need the active DJ in-game while they're working, and that would cause problems because the game takes a lot of power to run and the stream wouldn't be nearly as high-quality as it should be. All in all, I'm sort of putting Second Life on the shelf for right now. I need to build up some sort of community for the station.

I've been thinking about using some sort of BBS to build people up, but with whats been happening to Duane's website and all I'm not even sure I want to invite that sort of trouble. I have enough problems trying to get people into the channel, and even then they dont stay long because i'm normally away from the computer or working on homework or the website. I wish I could find someone to staff the channel at all times, but for now it's just me.

Speaking about the IRC channel for just a second though, I recently added the link for a web-based IRC client that allows the users to connect to the channel without having to install an IRC client on their computer. It connects them to the right server and channel and still acts as a normal IRC client in that you can still navigate to other channels from my web-client. I also recently installed a trivia bot into the channel to give users something to do while they listen to the radio, but I've recently also found that having the bot running while people are there tends to make it a little hard to talk to each other.

Thats about all the news I've got for right now, but I'll keep you guys posted on the changes coming in the future and hopefully we'll get some real groups into chat sometime! Also, I will be letting everyone know when I get the capability to take live Skype calls on the air again. That is a really fun way to involve the listeners and honestly it's a lot of fun on the DJ's end.

Thanks for listening and keep tuning in~! ^^

Website caveats, holdbacks, problems, and more!

Well, as the title says, we've had some issues with the new website. Once of them being at the beginning of last week I had no idea how to write up a website in DreamWeaver. Thankfully after a few days worth of playing with it, I got something workable, not pretty, but workable. Sadly all that work was in vain as the web-host I was trying to use decided to drop my account for reasons I'm still not clear of. In any case, we're moving onwards and upwards.

In other news, I've started up a twitter for the up to the minutes updates regarding the status of the stream, and hopefully I'll be able to talk the other DJs into using the twitter account too, that way we can (hopefully) gain some more attention on the web rather than just trying to pull people from Facebook and the other website I frequent.  Not much other promotion going on at the moment. I'm trying to work with the founder of AudioCream to get some more people from his listings, but I'm unfamiliar with his system and I thought I could use a few tips from him. Hopefully we'll talk later this week to figure things out as far as promoting the station and maybe things we can do to benefit each other. Even though his website isn't in dire need of traffic (I'm sure he gets ten times more people on his site than I do on the stream), his site has helped me and I want to return the favour.

In the Second Life realm there's nothing to report, seeing as my video card gives me a problem each time I try to sign onto the game to start designing the club.I'm going to have to end up using my half-decade old XPS gen 2 to build everything in game and then hopefully pull some listeners form that too. I loved Second Life when I played a long time ago (maybe a year or two ago?) and I always loved the clubs and games and things one could do in any of the places that broadcast radio into the game.

Listener-ship has been way up this month too! In December we had over 10,000 unique listeners and we're already more than halfway there for this month! On Friday we had over 40 people listening at a given time for about three hours in the middle of the day. Thats a new peak number for us! Woo! I'm looking forward to the future of the station and I think we'll be doing really well in the next few months!

The IRC channel is still completely empty most of the time, but thats really the least of my worries lately. I sit in the channel all the time, even when I'm not home there's a signed in person (TerminalFault41-4A-41-5A-59, which is AMAZY in hex XD) holding the channel open. Eventually I'll get the programming knowledge to write her up as a bot so she'll be able to auto-greet people and maybe run a trivia game or something. I'm not sure. I'll figure that out as I work out the rest of everything.

Keep on listening and thanks for making the last month so successful!

Promote, promote, promote!!

So the radio has been just booming right along this month!  Listeners are still coming in and we have about 5000 unique hits on the stream in January and the month isn't even half way over yet! We reach so many different countries and people and they listen for such long stretches of time, it still boggles me.

On to the progress report for the website, the faceyspace page, the stream, and the other varied projects I'm working on and with my DJs to bring even more people into the mix. First off, the website. I'm currently working on getting some webspace to put up a new site, but the address will still be the same (http://www.amazyfm.co.cc) but the site will look completely different. I've recently found out that flash-based anything is pretty much invisible to the standard web spider (those things that go throughout the net to find new pages and index them to their respective search engines) and thus the website isn't getting any traffic. Hopefully I can change that.

Also, I've been having issues with the IRC channel for the last few days. It seems the channel on the website and the channel on IRC itself aren't the same channel, so if you've been going to the website's channel, I'm sorry no one has been int here to speak to you~!

The facebook page is also getting  a bit better for the wear, since we've gotten over 25 people to like it I have recently gotten a username address for it! Now it's www.facebook.com/amazyfm instead of that horrific string of nonsense that no one can repeat over the air. Hopefully we'll be able to announce the facebook page and the website a bit more often on the radio to get more and more people making requests and getting into the action rather than not realizing that we're (sort of) trying to provide a community space for our listeners.

 Speaking of community, I'm also planning on having some sort of streaming into Second Life at some point in the near future, but that all depends on how many new DJs we can get rolling in the next few months. So, DJs! get in contact with me if you want to try DJing internet radio or if you've done it before and want to get back into it, I'll be allowing people to try it out this weekend and most weekends after this one. I want to bring in some new people (not to say the one's we have aren't good of course ^.~) to bring a little more diversity to the music we play.

I think thats about all I've got to report this week, and once again I apologize for the downtimes and deadspace on the radio. I've been having issues lately. Also, I'm going to try and keep this blog update business up and post at least one a week, that way you'll know (if you check for this in the first place) what's going on with the station.

The Apologies and update

First off, I would like to apologize for the dead space that seems to keep creeping into the radio's queue. This is a connection problem between the TB external drive I use to hold my music and the computer. At some points the plug gets knocked off by some little people who will not be mentioned (yeah, my kids) and thus SAM (the software I use to broadcast) kinda has a hissy fit and stops working.

This normally wouldnt cause a problem as one would expect me to actually be around when I'm broadcasting, but alas, no. Due to the limitation placed on me regarding my network usage at the house, I'm generally not even around my computer when the stream is mine. I'm not able to stream from 1900-2300 (GMT -5), so basically I can stream during the day (when I'm at work, of course) and overnight. Hopefully in the near future I'll figure out a way to be able to go back to the 24/7 stream I'm used to, or maybe I'll have to find someone to take the day time, and then someone else to take the chunk of time I can't stream, then I could take it overnight.

I'm still not sure how all of that will work, but hopefully the stream will stay constantly on, regardless of who has the stream at any given moment. In my own defense, I did mention that the first week of the new schedule would be a little screwy, at least until we can all figure out what the hell is going on long enough to make a plan and make sure there is always someone streaming.

Alrighty then, now that I'm done with my complaining, lets get the positives. To all those who listen, THANK YOU!!! You're listening to me and my other DJs makes all the work we all put into the station totally worth it. Skambrent and Lucent have been absolutely wonderful at picking up my slack lately, and to them I'm completely grateful.

As for the website, I've gotten an embedded IRC channel on there for you guys to put in requests, and when any given DJ is running the stream, they should be in there for you to request to. Also, there will be a domain name for the website eventually, but it's going to look completely different. I'll keep you guys posted as soon as I figure out how to do what I want to do with the website.

In closing, once again, I'd really just like to thank everyone who listens to us! We play the music for you, and if no one listens we feel lonely. Well, I do, I can't speak for the others, haha.

New beginnings

So, after taking a short break over the winter vacation, I'm going to be back on the radio tonight. From now on, there will be a sort of odd programming schedule since I've recently been informed of my broadcasting limitations. For a little while it may seem strange, but we'll all get used to it relatively soon, and once I add on a few more DJs it'll even itself out eventually. The new schedule will come up on the website once I figure it all out.

Moving on, I would like to thank those DJs who stepped up over the break to help me in my time of technical issues. Lucent and Skambrent, ya'll did fantastic and we kept the listeners up the whole time and even built on our base over the break! So, super huge hand to you guys, and we'll keep up the good work hopefully!

On to music, which I'm not sure what is going on with. My collection is heavily anime, techno, trance, etc with a sprinkling of 80's, 90's, punk, ska, blah blah blah. I'm trying to add in new music that I think ya'll would like better than my (at times) terribly obscure taste in music. If you have any suggestions, please leave them on the AmazyFM facebook page.

That'll be it for right now. Thanks for listening!