WFIU: New Media Projects

I had a question from a listener yesterday about how to create/modify bookmarks in Real Player. For anyone who is having the same problem, here’s how to do it:

1) open Real Player
2) in the menu bar (at the top of the screen) click on “file” and then “open location”
3) copy and paste, or type the url for the stream you want to add (for example: http://hannibal.ucs.indiana.edu:8000/wfiu_low.m3u), click “open” (the stream should load and begin to play)
4) now, look at the menu bar again and click on “bookmarks”
5) in the drop down menu, select “add current to favorites,” this will give you an option to create a name for the bookmark, do that and click “ok”
6) In the bookmarks menu, you will now see a shortcut to this stream,
you can do this for all of the streams you regularly access.

The only bad thing here is that in order to access these, you will need to first open real player.

To create a desktop shortcut that will automatically open Real Player you need to create a .ram file that points at the streaming url. Explaining how .ram files work is a little beyond the scope of this post (basically they’re playlist files that tell Real Player which files to play and in what order.

Here are four files, which, if you simply download these to your shortcuts folder or place them on your desktop, will behave as direct shortcuts to the streams which WILL automatically open in Real player:

(right-click to download)

http://wfiu.indiana.edu/media/wfiu-hi.ram

http://wfiu.indiana.edu/media/wfiu-lo.ram

http://wfiu.indiana.edu/media/wfiu2-hi.ram

http://wfiu.indiana.edu/media/wfiu2-lo.ram

This is a response to Jim Fleming, but I thought I would speak to this issue at a bit more length…

Our general content philosophy is to begin positioning ourselves as a source for in depth local news as well as arts and culture.

We’ve always had a strong local news department, but we’re currently in the process of merging our radio and TV news operations. This has a lot of implications online, because we want to begin doing more in-depth reporting and offer images, video, and text along with our audio content.

Once we get the new site completely rolled out (early 2009 and beyond), the arts stuff will be much more user friendly (we’ll also be making playlists, upcoming, and archived programs much more readily available). This will replace the arts page here, with something much cleaner and easier to use.
The general thinking to make as much of our broadcast content available online as possible and make it easy to access through various forms of site navigation and search, while beginning to branch out and produce new online only content to begin to capture a new, younger web-savvy audience. This is driving a lot of our podcast development these days, as well as an upcoming partnership with NPR to bring news content to mobile devices, and even an online video project around “A Moment of Science” that we recently received grant funding for. More on all of these projects later.

We’re making some more design refinements today to what is up in the new layout, let me know what you all think. Basically we’re trying to declutter a few places and make these top level pages easier to scan at a glance.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

We’ve launched and are testing the online streams of our new HD2 channel.

We have  an FAQ about HD radio and have also posted the schedule for this new stream.

The levels for the new HD2 streams are a little out of whack and we’re working on that now, but hopefully once we get those issues worked out this new stream will provide access to NPR programs that a lot of listeners have been asking for and that we don’t currently air on our main channel.

We’ve also switched our live streams to MP3 (actually m3u) format from Windows Media and Real Audio. There are a lot of reasons for the change (consistency across our site, audio quality, moving to an open standard rather than a proprietary format, the technical support we receive from Indiana University, and others) but I know this is going to cause some problems for people who have bookmarks pointing at the old streams.

If you click on the MP3 links from our homepage, they will open by default in our popup streaming player, but you can also bookmark the link urls and open them in windows media player, real player, winamp, itunes, etc.

For quick reference, here are those direct links to all four of the new streams so you can update your bookmarks:
WFIU-1
http://hannibal.ucs.indiana.edu:8000/wfiu_hi.m3u
http://hannibal.ucs.indiana.edu:8000/wfiu_low.m3u

WFIU-2:
http://hannibal.ucs.indiana.edu:8000/wfiu2_hi.m3u
http://hannibal.ucs.indiana.edu:8000/wfiu2_low.m3u

If you’re still having issues with our streams, send me a note, and I’ll do what I can to help you work them out.

We had a recent comment about the new site design not fitting onto the user’s screen and I wanted to share with you the common screen resolutions as percentages of total visitors to our site.

Basically, the going thinking in design for the web is to create 960 pixel wide layouts which fit well on 1024×768 screens (by far the most common resolution in use today). This does create a problem for users who still have older 800×600 screens and to deal with this we typically create a design such that the content area is visible on those screens, but the sidebar unfortunately is partially obscured.

The chart is our web traffic for the month of June to wfiu.org. Sorry it’s a little hard to read, you can click on it to view a full-sized version.

I just put up newly revised podcast pages here: http://wfiu.org/podcast.php.

We assume most people use iTunes to listen to podcasts, but we wanted to give a few more easy options to subscribe. What programs (or sites) do you use to subscribe to and listen to podcasts?

I also a received a recent comment from someone who prefers longer podcasts and I wanted to give you a little insight into why our newer podcasts sound the way they do.

First, we’ve working to offer as many complete programs as podcasts as possible. The thing that hangs us up here, and in creating new programs are issues with music rights. NPR has negotiated a special deal with the RIAA and Sound Exchange to allow us to use up to one-minute segments of music in our podcasts, but any longer and we have to obtain clearances from the record labels for each individual track (an overwhelming amount of work for most of our music programs).

We’ve been creating programs that work around this limitation, but we’re also open to new ideas for programs or podcasts, feel free to contact me and let me know if you have an idea.

We’re testing a new design for the WFIU homepage at wfiu.org.

This is still very much a work in progress, and we’d love to hear your comments and feedback.

Do you like the new design or hate it? Are we missing anything? What would you like to see more (or less) of on wfiu.org?

We welcome your suggestions. Leave us comments on the blog or contact me directly with any thoughts you have.