Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting

As a way to extend our “learning by doing” and “learning by real world experience” philosophy, we’ve decided to make some of our coding projects open source on SourceForge.

Some of you may be asking — what does this even mean?  Well, for those of you who don’t know, an “open source” application is one where you can download the source code to your computer, change the program, contribute to its development, or even create your own “fork” of it.  (The Mac OS X operating system is a fork of UNIX, an open source operating system).  Our goal is to make the code simple, readable to people of all skill levels (this means extensive commenting and explanations throughout the code itself), very modular (so beginners can start at the top and work their way down, while those who have prior experience can jump in wherever they feel comfortable), and most importantly — set an example for code that is well-documented and well-designed.

By making the project open source, we hope to give even those who have no interest in becoming members of KLIK the opportunity to explore computer programming at a more in-depth level.

The first victim of this is the KLIK Podcaster.  Recently, the Podcaster took a major nosedive – just in time for us to start playing show re-runs at 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM.  The original utility was envisioned as being just that — a small utility — which didn’t require any major framework.  As we started to add more and more features (like Twitter integration, etc.), the application became more and more unstable.  As such, we’ve scrapped all the old code and are starting from the ground up!  We’re using a multitiered architecture, and will hopefully have a working version out and about very soon.

The Podcaster may even be useful to broadcasters and Internet radio stations elsewhere.  There are thousands of installations of SAM Broadcaster out there, which is what the Podcaster was originally designed to work with.  We’re even considering making the Podcaster a standalone application which does all show recording and MP3 encoding internally, so there wouldn’t even be a need to have a specific broadcasting program.

We will be putting up a separate WordPress blog on the SourceForge project web site very soon.  In the meantime, you can browse the project page and find source code that’s already there.