With the Brown County Hour now on a monthly schedule (1st Sunday of every month at 9AM on WFHB), it seemed a good time to update our website. We’ve been using WordPress ever since we launched the show back in June of 2010, and have been quite happy with the tools it provided us. And so must a lot of other folks, apparently… it’s estimated that WordPress, a vibrant open-source content management system in existence now for several years, powers upwards of 20% of the web! So we saw no need to try reinventing the wheel, but instead dug in for a major and long-overdue upgrade of our WP installation.
The site has been bumped up to the latest version of WordPress (v 3.6), all our fancy little plugins have similarly been updated, our wood & leaf theme made the migration intact… and perhaps most importantly for our users, our old (and now obsolete) audio playback plugin has been replaced with a nifty new audio player that offers you, our listener, more flexibility in your streaming experience.
What this means for you is now, when you stream one of our shows, you can control the playback volume, skip back and forth in the program, mute, pause and (a new feature) download the show for your personal digital archives! Check out the graphic below for details on how the new audio player functions.
Now if you decide to download one of our episodes, bear in mind that the show is an hour of stereo audio in MP3 format, with a file size hovering around 85 MBs or so. It’ll download fairly easily on any kind of broadband connection, but if you’re on a dial-up connection (as many still are in Brown County), be prepared for very long download times and possible ISP timeout. The BCH team is working on providing “alternative audio acquisition accommodation” for the bandwidth-impaired. We’ll keep y’all posted.
