Thanks for bearing with us during our week-long absence! We are happy to unveil our brand new Radio Free Bay Ridge homepage. We’ve made quite a few changes to the layout and look of the site. We’re keeping our minimal design motif, but are focusing on delivering an audio-first experience. We have big new shiny play buttons for our podcast episodes, front and center. We also have changed our provider, so the audio loads faster and without extra cookies and unwanted code slowing things down. Also, our episodes are more organized and searchable than ever , with even more fun goodies coming soon!
What’s Changed?
Most of our improvements are visual, but we’ve made some big upgrades behind the scenes. Here are three of the biggest ones…
New Media Player
We have brand-new media players! We won’t be relying on third-party players (cough *soundcloud* cough) from now on. This means no trackers, no reliance on other sites being up or down, and hopefully a much smoother experience if you want to listen to our podcast in a browser or from your phone.
Audio Bookmarks
The redesign also give us brand-new opportunities to find the content you want, quickly. The biggest improvement is audio bookmarks, which will let you jump around quickly to specific parts of an audio track! You can check them out now on our Universal Rent Control episode page, right below the Show Notes section. We’re going to be going through our previous episodes and adding in these bookmarks over the next few months.
Community Archive Improvements
We also wanted to focus on cleaning up and expanding our Community Archive. The Community Archive contains audio from events, town halls, debates, and much more. They don’t upload to our podcast, so you can only access them on our website! Combined with audio bookmarks and new tags, finding specific events and discussions has never been easier.
What’s Next?
Posting Our Back Catalog
Now that we’ve reworked the site we’ll have a better opportunity to work through our massive back catalog of Community Archive events! That includes recordings of rallies, protests, town halls, and more dating back to 2017! We’ll also be able to bring you our full oral history archive, which we recorded during the summer of 2018. We only had time to post about 1/3rd of the total last year.
Transcripts
This is the next big project we want to tackle. It’s incredibly important for the hearing impaired to be able to access the audio we’ve recorded, and transcripts are the best way to make that possible. We’ve already found a relatively easy way to generate transcripts, and hope to begin adding them before the end of the 2019.
Let us know if you like the new design or have any questions, comments or issues! ❤ You can email us at [email protected] or leave a comment below.