Posted: 03-08-2023
It’s been a while since my last blog update (nearly 8 months!). In that time, I’ve grown the YouTube channel to nearly 1000 subscribers and produced a lot of music but I’m back to revisit some of the issues with SOF Radio.
As it stands, we’re running 24/7 with a schedule and all in all everything is running smoothly. There are however a few problems that I have not been able to fix, little niggles that are really doing my head in.
Firstly I had to address the problem of what happens when a schedule period ends and another starts. What I mean by this is ‘Back to the 80s’ runs from 9am – 12pm and ‘On the House’ runs 12pm – 3pm. Currently if you’re grooving to the 80s tracks and it reached 12pm, you’d still be listening to the 80s tunes until you manually clicked refresh. I got around that by adding an ajax refresh that initially brings a countdown from 60 seconds at 11:59am and at 12pm the page automatically refreshes and the next show starts (which the schedule would recognise as house music) and all would be golden, at least on a desktop as the player is set to autoplay so other than a few seconds of silence in the transition all would be fine. On mobile however, auto play is generally not supported. Not only that, an ajax refresh is generally seen by browsers as something potentially unwanted so instead of just refreshing, it will alert the user first with a modal popup so if you didn’t happen to be looking at your mobile when this happened, you may not even have known it was there. Even if you did, once hitting refresh it wouldn’t autoload for the reasons mentioned above.
As it stands, this is the main issue I have that is ruining the ‘native’ radio experience and something I need to address. Other than that I think we’re generally looking quite good.
I don’t want this to be half baked, I want it to be freaking awesome.
I shall continue.
Stay tuned…
