Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting

In truth, no news is generally good news.  In honesty, we just don’t have anyone who is dedicated to reporting the news!  If you’re interested, please volunteer with us. 🙂

There are a lot of things happening.  Here’s the basic scoop:

Want to go to Elitch Gardens for $25?! So do we.  We’re selling tickets again this year as part of Elitch Gardens’ Coasters for Caring program.  We earn $5 for each ticket sold, and all money comes directly to our organization and is put into use immediately — no waiting for a check from Elitch’s at the end of the program.  If you want to buy one, scoot on over here, or call us at 970-281-5545.

Want to donate to us using an eBay auction?  It’s now possible! We’re finally listed in the MissionFish database, which means you can donate to KLIK using an eBay auction.  Got something around your house you don’t want?  Donate a portion of the proceeds directly to KLIK, and you get extra exposure due to the fact that a portion of your auction is going to charity!  You can learn more over on eBay about how the program works.  It also means we can experiment with using things like eBay for selling in-kind donations that we don’t particularly need, as well as the possibility of selling advertising time on eBay (it could be an interesting experiment).

Silence for Sound?  TBD. We’re still trying to work with the Fort Collins Downtown Business Association to secure a date to use the Old Town Stage for our next Silence for Sound adventure.  Once we have a date, things can start rolling with bands.  Volunteers are already on active look-out for donated items for auction.

Colorado Meth Project partnership. We are excited to announce (even if it is a bit premature) that the Colorado Meth Project is going to be sponsoring KLIK Radio.  There will be an on-air interview in the coming future, and we will be airing their “not even once” ads throughout the day to raise awareness of the dangers of methamphetamine use, as well as its usage here in Colorado.

8z Real Estate., also known as COHomeFinder.com, Has decided to sponsor us for another year!  Yay!  Head on over to our Sponsors page to check out their link and information.

On that note, new advertising rates are coming soon. Now that businesses are actually showing interest in advertising with us (apparently 4 years old is the mark where people say “okay, I guess they’re not going anywhere…”), we’re coming up with a better pricing model for advertising.  If you are interested in buying advertising on our station, please contact us.

The board of directors transition to college students and alumni mixed with high school students is complete. In case you missed the transition, head on over to our board of directors page to see who the current directors are.  Hopefully we can get some pics or bios up later, too.

We’re getting closer to closing the gap in funding to purchase our telephony software.  We’re getting closer to being able to purchase a $1,700 piece of software which will allow us to manage up to 6 telephone calls simultaneously.  It will also add functionality for conference calling and allowing callers who are currently on-hold to hear the caller on air – something that currently doesn’t happen.  The upgrade will also require an upgraded sound card, which is adding to the delay in launching the final stage in our upgrade process called “KLIK Interactive” which started last year.

PaCE interns are starting to take over more and more software development. That means I can start leaving behind the day-to-day programming work and focus more on keeping the organization going.

The open source Podcaster is actually being tried out by others beyond KLIK. Yes, people, the Podcaster has gained a little bit of attention.  For awhile, I was receiving 10 e-mails a day or so about the Podcaster producing errors on other people’s computers (not impressive, I know, but based on the errors, it was always the user’s fault.  And, in my defense, the error handling mechanism works, so HA!)  There are a few developers from the CodePlex community who have signed on, but I have yet to get in touch with them, as I really have very little time to work on the Podcaster at the moment.  In about a month or so, I hope to really pick up the pace and work on it in my spare time outside of my newly-landed job at FM Global (yay!).  While I am in their employment for approximately 7 months, I should have a good deal of after-work time to put in to the Podcaster, since I won’t have to worry about school.  So!  The Podcaster is under way.

An open source version of our Uploader is coming to the blog…soon. We created a song uploader that we simply call “The Uploader.”  It basically copies files from members’ computers to our studio computers and adds it to our music library automatically.  It uses several pieces of open source software, both GPL and LGPL (ffmpeg, an ID3 library, and LAME MP3 to name a few), and we need to release the source code for it.  The problem is that it contains several hard-coded passwords, host names, and usernames for KLIK servers that we don’t want out and about in the public.  We’ll be redacting those, then releasing the code (so it’s pretty much there and complete, but without the security risks for us 🙂 ).  Anyways, if for some reason you are already familiar with the Uploader project and are wondering where the source code is, it’s coming.

That’s it!  Have a nice day!