jeffrey robert lange

It’s week six of my Sophomore year here at Valparaiso University, and I love being on the radio. Last semester was my introduction to the radio world, and I am part of a stable morning show now.

The name of my show is “Rockin with Robo Panda”. It was the winning show name for an online poll, so we couldn’t not have the name.

As a morning show, we do an interview for each show. I love doing interviews, mainly because you get to talk to some cool people. So far I’ve interviewed Matthew Thiessen of Relient K, Genevieve Schatz of Company of Thieves, Evan Sears of the Sapiens, Nathaniel Motte of 3OH!3, and Chris Rolfe of the Chicago Fire. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come, and I’ll keep you posted. For all of the podcasts, go to www.valpo.edu/wvur and click on podcasts.

Today was the last day of interviews for me. I was interviewing for jobs next school year in the IT department. I interviewed for the Help Desk on Tuesday, and Web Services on Thursday. I only applied to the two fields that I knew I would feel comfortable in. The full time staff member who interviewed me for the Web Services basically told me that I had the job. He was really happy to see that I was interested in the job, and he asked me what position I wanted. This made me feel really good about myself, basically knowing that I have a work-study job next year. I was nervous about the whole “find a job” process, but really it was rather pleasant. My Help Desk interview lasted for a good hour and a half, but it felt like 45 minutes. It was, in one word, fun.

This can only help me with my WVUR webmaster position, and my major. Yay!

Like most well formed websites, WVUR wants to add more graphics to their pages. Jeremy came up with a way to grab a random picture from the SourceStock image folder, which is working quite well. One issue with the site, or rather valpo’s server in general, is that you can’t see the files you upload until an even hour. For example, if you upload a picture, it will be uploaded right away, but it won’t go to the live site until 4, 6, 8, 10 pm. If you upload a picture at 4:05, you have to wait until 6 until the stage loads it. However, the CMS runs on MySQL, which is an ever refreshing database, so if we write a blog and the picture we want is already live on our server or another server (aka Flickr), the picture will show up right away.

On a whim, I suggested that we set up a Flickr account for WVUR and just upload pictures there. Jeremy wondered how easy it would be to have everyone upload, though. Whenever you introduce another feature, it shouldn’t require a new login or page to go to, that’s just a simple rule. Jeremy, on a whim, wondered if Joomla, the CMS we use for WVUR, made an component that would allow upload to Flickr. We couldn’t find one in the twenty minutes we spent looking, but we did find a PHP script that would do the exact same thing. Sweet! If that turns out to be a hassle, we could always just make a page that has Flickr in a “frame” (technically a wrapper) on the WVUR page.

What does this mean for our audience? More pictures, and faster! Woo!