When I first started with WVUR, I was a DJ with my friend Nate. We had no previous experience and knew none of the terms. So for the good of mankind, I’ll explain the terms that are commonly used.
Ramp - Not what you walk up, it’s talking over the end or beginning of a song as it is playing. If you perfect this you can sound really professional.
Sweeper - This is a 3-10 second audio clip that makes the transition between songs a little smoother. Often times this includes station information.
Voice Track - Recording your show ahead of time with your voice and music pre-loaded. This is commonly done for late night shifts.
Well, I hope this little article brought some insight into the world that is radio.
Have a nice weekend! The weather is amazing!
-Jeff Lange
WVUR Programming Director
Jeff Lange Uncategorized
During my office hours I did a little cleaning up and browsing through the cd stacks. A cd that caught my eye was Breakfast By the Dunes by Twittering Machine. I had to listen to this cd right away, for any band that was called Twittering Machine was worth at least one listen. Twittering Machine has a jazzy feel with whispery vocals and a sultry tone of tender Latin rhythms. That last sentence was from the sticker on the cover of the cd created by the record company.
Originally I thought that this band borrowed their name from the oh-so-popular micro-blogging service Twitter. I was wrong. This band released this debut album in 2003, while Twitter was publicly released in August of 2006. How interesting. Also, the first song on the cd is Birds. I can’t make this stuff up. It’s pretty crazy that this band had the name of a now insanely influential internet powerhouse three entire years before Twitter was even created.
I have to say, this could be my new relaxation cd. It’s pretty smooth.
Jeff Lange Webmastering music
Yesterday I started work on upgrading our website from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.10. This would be like whistling (really easy) for me, except for the fact that our server is not directly writeable. We have to upload to a stage server which then syncs with the live server every even hour.
I got the new version of joomla installed and now the template just needs to be modified to look like the old one.
Training has started with next year’s webmaster, Chris Kleinhans-Schulz. He’s a quick learner and he can come up with some goofy dummy-text — a skill needed by any webmaster.
For now things are going well. Let’s hope the end of this year and next year goes well.
Jeff Lange Webmastering joomla, Webmaster
I went into this weekend with a project on my shoulders. This project is the DJ Challenge which happens to be a rap battle created by the amazing Harry Cassin. I did not know how the previous voting system worked, so this was not good.
Jeremy Wilken, the webmaster before me, was amazing at coding. He was also was very good at training me. However, he couldn’t teach me everything he knew. One of the things that he didn’t teach me was how the DJ Challenge system worked. By my judgement, this is the most complicated thing on the website. Not only does it let people vote for things, but it plays audio and displays little bar graphs, all generated by PHP and MySQL. Before Jeremy left for Germany he gave me all of the files he had on his computer. I had to walk through the thirty-something PHP files to figure out exactly how the system worked. It’s really quite elegant and amazing. There’s a database that holds all of the votes. The voting page is a iFrame (not to be confused with an iPhone) embedded in the Joomla CMS, which allows for it to look nice and run form elements otherwise shunned by CMS.
After I figured out how every file worked, I found a wierd redundancy that brought the voter to a page that looked like the WVUR site, but was on a different server. I decided to get rid of this and just display the voting confirmation/error message in the iFrame.
I never thought I would get out of this project sane, let alone with a better solution. Please let me know how you like the voting process either by email (jeff.lange1@valpo.edu) or in person.
-JL
Jeff Lange Webmastering DJ Challenge, Rap Battle, Webmaster
I finished the blog schedule for the entire year. This is for managers, but I figured that I might as well blog about it as well. I have two posts lined up each week the entire school year, which is ambitious, but you have to aim high.
The schedule is right here, so you have no excuses for knowing when you have to blog. However, if you do have questions about when to blog, please email me. I also got the applications uploaded for the interview process that will soon be upon us. And by us I mean Cameron.
I’m sure I’ll have more work to do after tonight, which is always fun. For now, I’ll see you guys next week or so.
Jeff Lange Webmastering Blogging, Webmaster
Today I had quite a bit of work to do, but I only had one project. Cameron wanted to launch the “corporate” blog today, and I knew that this project could be either very simple or extremely difficult. Luckily, it wasn’t too hard to do.
I started off by downloading the latest version of Wordpress from wordpress.org. I then uploaded the files to our server here at Valpo. Then I had to do the webmaster shuffle and wait until the next even hour (at the time it was 5:50 pm) which was 6 pm. After that, I confirmed that all of my configurations were correct. I then browsed some sweet themes over at wordpress’s theme viewer. I found some nice looking, corporate-esque themes that I liked. I created some usernames and passwords, and called the project a success. Now for the hard part: the content.
Jeff Lange Webmastering Webmaster