Radio 1 re-relaunch
Just a short while ago the website of Radio 1 was re-relaunched. You might recall that it was in fact relaunched at end of summer already. But that was just the initial migration from their legacy CMS to Ruby on Rails. In this latest re-relaunch I added a sweet amount of functionality.
The biggest national station for news and sports, Radio 1 recently changed its programming in order to reach a younger audience. There were many protests as you’d expect, but I think the change is a good one (and not nearly as dramatic as many people make it out to be).
The new site added a bunch of cool features that were sorely missing (and impossible to do in their old system). The sidebar now displays which program is ‘on air’. There’s a chance to call the studio live, send an email or leave a comment. All this is completely dynamic, of course.
I added an immense number of streams to programs broadcast in the past week. The hookup to the Electronic Programme Guide was not easy, but the end result is great. But that’s not the best change. Radio producers now have their own (independently developed) backend where they can cut up broadcasts (they call this ‘itemization’). Every segment gets an mp3, title and description and is fed into the internal broadcast network. And it also gets inserted into the Radio 1 website using a custom feed import. It creates articles that have proper tags, titles, comments, pictures, streams, you name it. Very cool! Because the backend is something all producers know, it gets used a lot and this means lots of articles on the site with very little trouble.
The finetuning of the website is an ongoing process and more custom feeds for e.g. football and weather will be added soon. Over all the customer is happy, I am proud and the readers seem to be happy with the site as well. Now they need to become happy with the new programme schedule though…
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