This week, Lunar completed his Bachelor’s program!
This means the station will be transitioning in the near-term to a “catch-up and development” phase while drafting plans to increase community development efforts in the mid- to long-term. For more details, read on!
With school and an incredibly dense semester out of the way, it’s high time we caught up with our episode and podcast backlog. Those who are used to listening to our Live shows and Meetup events after they’ve aired have been missing out since January. Under normal conditions, Live and Meetup are converted into podcasts and made publicly available about 1-2 weeks after the event date, but we had suspended production up to this point. Our patrons can expect episodes to be published via early access this coming week, with public access for everyone else shortly after.
Also suspended during the last few months was our “Variety Event” series where members of our staff team streamed off-platform around a few times a week. These events will be resuming starting tomorrow (May 15th). You can catch LunarSpotlight and DMJ654 via Twitch in the evenings (US time).
After episodes and podcasts are taken care of, we’ll then turn our attention to the technical side of things. First, the incident that occurred with our station during TouhouFest exposed a point of weakness at our colocation provider. Though they’ve described to us the steps they’re taking to prevent such an occurrence in the future, there’s more we can do on our end as well to further increase station stability and reduce the chances of dead air. We’ll also need to update our regional configuration so that our endpoints can gracefully handle source switching during broadcast and mitigation events. We’ll be working to minimize interruptions to the station during this process, and we’ll do our best to notify the public of any anticipated downtime.
Once housekeeping is done, we’ll transition back to our standard “laundry list” of internal projects which includes the web app (or mobile app v2.x), the April Project, Discord bot 2.0, and Genres. Items on this list have historically taken multiple months to get through. Even projects that appear simple like the rebuild of our Discord bot will require a lot of external support changes including new language that clearly explains how our radio station works inside and out.
During all of this, we’ll also be looking for ways to include community members in the development and creative processes behind our projects. As we talked about during Meetup #19 titled “Help Wanted”, making our projects more open will allow more people to help out with development and lessen the reliance on any single person at the radio station. Our hope is that the speed benefit will be greater than the overhead of increasing management requirements for our projects moving forward.
With that said, we’ve already talked to a few people some months ago, but if you’re interested in helping us with our projects, step on up! We could use developers, graphic artists, translators, and more in projects like our web app, and eventually to include additional projects and aspects of the station.
That’s all for this week, thanks for saying hello to someone new in our Discord server today, and thanks for listening!
[Knowledge #116]