Received and understood.
I'll pass along to my daughter your thoughts about her being an "inconsiderate web developer"
New Radio Reference homepage
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I'll pass along to my daughter your thoughts about her being an "inconsiderate web developer"
I'm really not trying to be disrespectful, but the new homepage looks like every-other-generic-vibe-coded-slop-page to hit the internet in recent years.
RR had its own identity, it was fine. I don't think the new page is an improvement. A light mode is sorely missing.
RR had its own identity, it was fine. I don't think the new page is an improvement. A light mode is sorely missing.
Did you really have to say "slop-page" if were trying trying not to be disrespectful?
In my opinion, your post was good enough with the second line only.
In my opinion, your post was good enough with the second line only.I like the sleek color scheme and overall layout. I could see a desire for a slightly brighter color, but that's just because I'm used to most pages having a generic white background. I haven't seen any other sites that look similar in color or design so I must be missing out on every-other-generic-vibe-coded-slop-page out there. But, it's all relative. Some people will like it and some will hate it. Personally, @blantonl I think your daughter did a good job. Not sure if she designs webpages for a living but she has talent!
When I did commercial webdesign for 10 yrs, I had a self code of conduct that said "You are not designing the site to suit yourself, you are designing it for the site visitor and it's usability". And guess what, no one ever had to complain that I used non contrasting colors or other wack job concepts that proliferated on the internet like vermin in the past 15 yrs, which I had total disdain for from their very start. Such as so called minimalist design, which throws all sensible webdesign conventions out the window.
That is a good code of conduct but... is she a 10 year veteran web designer with that code or just starting out?
Sorry, bud, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that in your 10 years of “commercial webdesign,” you never designed, built, or operated anything remotely comparable in scale or complexity to what we have here. This isn’t a five-page site for the local plumber where the big UX challenge is deciding whether the “Call for a Free Estimate” button should be blue or green. We’re serving an enormous, highly engaged audience, presenting massive amounts of constantly changing data, running subscriptions and customer accounts, supporting complex search and navigation, and hosting a discussion community where thousands of people are free to publicly critique every microscopic detail of the product…. including the design here. This operation probably sees more traffic and user interaction on a sleepy Sunday morning than many of the sites in your portfolio saw in an entire year.
And that doesn’t mean every design decision we make is automatically perfect. Criticism is fine; we actually listen to plenty of it. But there’s a pretty substantial difference between saying, “I think the contrast here could be better,” and rolling in with a lecture about your personal “code of conduct” and informing us that we’ve apparently spent 20+ years proliferating “wack job concepts like vermin.”
So since you’ve established yourself as the standard by which professional web design should apparently be judged, why don’t you point us toward a few of your commercial projects? I’m genuinely curious to see how that self-described code of conduct translated into those shining examples of superior web design where, apparently, nobody ever complained about anything. Surely some of those masterpieces are still online on Geocities.
None of them were on any free hosting site. I bought the domains then set them up, then charged for that at the end. I used various CMSs such a WordPress and others, I created the site content in Adobe Fireworks & other programs and also custom coded a lot of content in WordPad++. The site coding constituted of PHP, HTML5, CCS and other languages. ... You are not a 100 percent raw site coder either, this forum is on a CMS and you know it. I also bet you did not raw code all of RR and BCFY either.
I didn't say you proliferated wack job concepts like vermin, but I sure did accuse all of the webmasters that embraced minimalist design of absolutely doing so. Minimalist web design was the scourge of the internet.
So, don't get in a pissing contest with me about web design, or you'll quickly run out of piss.
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Oh, you bet I didn’t? Well, unfortunately for this little pissing contest, you bet….. wrong.
Let me clear that up for you: the entire RadioReference website, with the exception of the forums and wiki, was custom-developed from scratch by me. Broadcastify? Same thing. The backend systems, databases, APIs, subscription infrastructure, data presentation, integrations, operational tooling… the whole ecosystem behind these businesses was built and developed by me over more than two decades. I’ve never claimed the forums weren’t running on commercial forum software. That’s not exactly the revelation you seem to think it is.
You’re still spectacularly missing the point. You keep telling us about your decade of elite commercial web-design experience, WordPad++, PHP, “CCS 🤔,” and your personal code of conduct, but after all that chest-thumping you still haven’t produced a single example of your work. Not one. Where are these websites where nobody ever complained and sensible web design reached its final, perfect form? I really want to bow down to your glory and kiss the ring, but you’ve given me nothng.
This also isn’t some hobby website I threw together between dinner and bedtime. RadioReference/Broadcastify is a multi-million-dollar operating business serving an enormous audience with infrastructure, traffic, transactions, data volume, and operating expenses on a scale that I strongly suspect exceeds the total revenue of your entire lifetime of web-design work. In fact, I’D BET one year of our revenue exceeds everything you’ve earned from web design over your entire career. Our expense side of the P&L alone would probably make the economics of your 10-year web-design career look like a rounding error.
Here‘s the real fun kicker… after the design changes we made over the summer, our subscription revenue increased by a little over 18 percent. That means one thing and one thing only: our work paid off, the changes were overwhelmingly accepted by the community, and the results speak for themselves. People vote with their wallets first and foremost, and the wallets have spoken.
None of that means you have to like every design decision we make. Criticize away. But if you’re going to swagger in here telling the guy who actually built and operates all of this that I’ll “quickly run out of piss” in a web-development argument, you might want to bring something more impressive to the table than “I bought domains, installed WordPress, and wrote a little PHP.”
So, again: show us the work. You’ve spent two posts telling us how good you were at this. Surely there’s something out there we can admire.
All I can say is it looks nice and it works. Programming was not for me. I did work in the computer field back in the late 70's. (No Internet or PC's) I knew programmers at the data center I worked at back then. Looking at a print out of code like I would read the paper. After 45 years in the field I retired. I want to give my congratulations to your daughter for what she has done. It is not easy to do what she did. Think about it; going to the database, forums, WIKI and the other areas. Clicking on the one you want and you get there.
I want to add one of the big things I worked on back on the day was we were told there was new technology coming out where you put this card in a machine and it gives you money. Yes the data center serviced banks.
I want to add one of the big things I worked on back on the day was we were told there was new technology coming out where you put this card in a machine and it gives you money. Yes the data center serviced banks.
I never heard of WordPad++. I looked it up figuring it may be something worth trying. I use Notepad++ for all my HTML and PHP coding and I wanted to see if it's better. Nothing came up. Did you mean to say Notepad++?
Just did a quick internet search. According to both CoPilot and Google, it is a lighweight text editor that offers more features than the old Windows Wordpad. It is a third party program not made by Mircosoft and has very limited tools (no save as, page setup or paragraph formatting.) Notepad++ pretty much replaced it from what I understand.
I had never heard of ”CCS” either. Must be one of those cascading things for advanced web developers, not our amateur hour work that we do around here
Wordpad++ is probably a rich code text editor that allows you to use bold and italics in your code. That helps the code compiler and interpreters to better understand the intention of the code you wrote.
Ha Ha
The last time I played with webpage design was in the mid-90s and I used vi as my editor on a Unix machine. It was a simple page just for fun, nothing professional. I can't imagine programming the Radio Reference or Broadcastify sites using an editor much less by hand, so I salute @blantonl and his daughter for a job well done! We can argue the appearance until the end of time; everyone has their own tastes and opinions hence the often mis-used quote "The customer is always right in taste and fashion." However, to get to the heart of this topic, I think the website is easy to use and I can find what I'm looking for without any issues. The only suggestion I would make is for the link to the forums to be placed more prominently, perhaps on the same line as the "Open the Database" and "My RR" buttons; however, since 9.9 times out of 10, I'm checking on my favorite departments and systems through My RR, I'll click on that, then go to the forums from there.
From Adobe.com-
"Adobe Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor which was developed and distributed from 1998 through 2012. Fireworks was made for web designers for rapidly creating website prototypes and application interfaces. Its features included slices, which are segments of an image that are converted to HTML elements, and the ability to add hotspots, which are segments of an image that are converted to hyperlinks."
I think we know now when that 10 year time period was.
"Adobe Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor which was developed and distributed from 1998 through 2012. Fireworks was made for web designers for rapidly creating website prototypes and application interfaces. Its features included slices, which are segments of an image that are converted to HTML elements, and the ability to add hotspots, which are segments of an image that are converted to hyperlinks."
I think we know now when that 10 year time period was.
For me, that's it. The new homepage is the straw that broke the camel's back. RR is dead. Long live RR.
I don't have a problem with RR making money. Running the service costs money. But let's not pretend this is an even exchange.
The feed provider buys the equipment, pays for the power and internet connection, sets everything up, keeps it running, and supplies the content.
What does the provider get back? Hosting, some statistics, archive access, and a premium subscription. That's not nothing, but it doesn't come close to matching the value RR gets from the arrangement. RR gets a huge catalog of free content that it can monetize through advertising, subscriptions, archive access, and commercial licensing. The provider gets no share of that revenue and very little say in what happens to the feed once it reaches RR.
Broadcastify now advertises access to its live-feed catalog for $2,500 a month and openly welcomes transcription, AI, and LLM projects. As far as I can see, the person supplying the audio has no way to opt out or decide who gets to process it. Commercial users are even told to credit the audio as "Audio Provided by Broadcastify," not to credit the volunteer who actually provided it.
Then they disabled embedding. A provider can send a feed to Broadcastify around the clock but can no longer put that same feed on their own website. Paid third parties can access and process the material, while the provider loses one of the few genuinely useful features offered in return. The documentation still advertises embedding as a provider benefit even though it has already been turned off.
Competing scanner apps apparently aren't welcome now, but commercial AI use is fine as long as it goes through Broadcastify. That doesn't look much like a community platform anymore. It looks like a walled garden where the community supplies the product for free.
The AI-generated homepage isn't the whole problem. It's just the most visible sign of what RR has become.
If that's the business RR wants to run, fine. But I'm out. We all have choices to make.
I don't have a problem with RR making money. Running the service costs money. But let's not pretend this is an even exchange.
The feed provider buys the equipment, pays for the power and internet connection, sets everything up, keeps it running, and supplies the content.
What does the provider get back? Hosting, some statistics, archive access, and a premium subscription. That's not nothing, but it doesn't come close to matching the value RR gets from the arrangement. RR gets a huge catalog of free content that it can monetize through advertising, subscriptions, archive access, and commercial licensing. The provider gets no share of that revenue and very little say in what happens to the feed once it reaches RR.
Broadcastify now advertises access to its live-feed catalog for $2,500 a month and openly welcomes transcription, AI, and LLM projects. As far as I can see, the person supplying the audio has no way to opt out or decide who gets to process it. Commercial users are even told to credit the audio as "Audio Provided by Broadcastify," not to credit the volunteer who actually provided it.
Then they disabled embedding. A provider can send a feed to Broadcastify around the clock but can no longer put that same feed on their own website. Paid third parties can access and process the material, while the provider loses one of the few genuinely useful features offered in return. The documentation still advertises embedding as a provider benefit even though it has already been turned off.
Competing scanner apps apparently aren't welcome now, but commercial AI use is fine as long as it goes through Broadcastify. That doesn't look much like a community platform anymore. It looks like a walled garden where the community supplies the product for free.
The AI-generated homepage isn't the whole problem. It's just the most visible sign of what RR has become.
If that's the business RR wants to run, fine. But I'm out. We all have choices to make.
I've barely used Broadcastify and that was just when I moved to my current location to see if certain talkgroups were worth programming into my favorites. With that and the fact that I'm not a feed provider, I've never really dealt with that side of RR. I just hop on to see what's new in the forums and see if anything has changed in the database that would affect what I like listening to. The re-design gives everything a different appearance that may or may not be better, but it is usable so to me RR is still alive. But, to each their own and I understand the frustration being expressed about the Broadcastify side. I just don't have an opinion on that either way.
I understand the frustration, but I think there’s a fairly important point missing from this argument: nobody is forcing anyone to provide a feed to RadioReference, and nobody is forcing anyone to use the site.
If you genuinely believe that the equipment, electricity, internet connection, maintenance and effort you put into providing a feed are worth more to RadioReference than what you receive in return, then you have every right to decide that the arrangement no longer represents good value for you. That’s a perfectly reasonable choice, but that is different from saying RadioReference is somehow exploiting you.
The arrangement has always been voluntary. You choose to provide the content because you presumably get something out of doing so, whether that is hosting, statistics, archive access, exposure, being part of the community, or simply enjoying having your feed available to others. RadioReference gets value from that content, just as you get value from the services it provides.
RadioReference is a business. Of course it is going to look for ways to generate revenue from the platform and the enormous amount of content it hosts. I don't particularly have a problem with that. The fact that they can monetise something doesn't automatically mean the person contributing it is being ripped off.
If the balance has changed to the point where the cost to you exceeds the value you get back, then stop providing the feed. That's the beauty of a voluntary arrangement. You don't need RadioReference's permission to decide that the deal isn't worthwhile anymore.
Likewise, if you don't like the homepage, the direction of the site, the AI features, the commercialisation, or the way the content is being used, you're also free not to use the site.
I think that's the part of this discussion that gets lost. You can absolutely say "I no longer think this is worth it, so I'm leaving." That's a perfectly valid position. But "I'm leaving, therefore RadioReference is exploiting its providers" is a much bigger claim.
Ultimately, both sides are making a choice. RadioReference gets to decide how it operates its platform, and feed providers get to decide whether they want to participate.
If the value proposition no longer works for you, walk away. Nobody is forcing you to provide the feed, or even to use RadioReference in the first place.
