Radio.Blog Me

After days of research and trial-and-error, I've finally got my own radio.blog up and running. Just what is a radio.blog? From radio.blog.club, "Radio.blog is the first stand-alone player that lets you stream sound on your website." A nifty tool for people who can't have all their songs on local storage, or if you simply want to share music. For now, I'm putting up my Top 5 Super Mushy Love Songs Best Played in the Middle of the Night when It's So Quiet You Can Hear a Pin Drop, which I mentioned before.

I tell you, setting up a radio.blog is not an easy task, even for a geek like me. The Flash app and the back-end scripts are straight-forward. The hard part is getting a webhost to host the program and media files. There are literally hundreds of free webhosts out there, but most of them are useless as radio.blog host. One webhost has a 300kB filesize limit. Another one doesn't actually support PHP. And all these details I only got to know after I've signed up. I can just imagine all the spam I'm gonna get in the coming months.

What to look for in a webhost:

• Free hosting. Why pay if something can be had for free?
• PHP support. radio.blog runs on PHP scripts and the player uses Flash.
• Storage space. The more megs, the more files on your playlist.
• Bandwidth. No point having lots of hosted files if users can't stream it off the host.
• Max filesize. This is one of the fine-print details they don't tell you about. What good is a host if it only allows 300kB music files?
• Direct-linking. If you're going to use the webhost simply as an online storage and put the player somewhere else, this is a must.
• Browser and FTP upload. Some hosts offer one or the other. Two is always better than one.

One thing you also need to remember: Only mp3 files encoded as 64kbps 22.05kHz joint-stereo or 32kbps 22.05khz mono are allowed. Tweak the settings a little bit and your RBS files will play back double-time.