Radio Free Elsewhere

Project Overview

Radio Free Elsewhere is an Internet radio station streaming eclectic music (Celtic folk, ambient/space, surf rock, and more). It runs on Icecast hosted on a Yunohost server. Streams are live and occasional — a few times per week in the evenings, typically around 7:30pm Eastern, running roughly two hours. This is not a 24/7 automated station.

The shows have distinct themes and identities:

O'Morain's Pub — Celtic folk
Cosmoeuphoria — ambient and space music
Bisexual Surfers From the Twilight of Time — surf rock and rockabilly
The Bollocks - punk rock
The Spin - eclectic tunes from all genres

Scope

This repo covers the frontend only — the public-facing website. Icecast configuration, Yunohost server administration, and streaming software are out of scope. Do not look for or suggest changes to server-side streaming config.

Key Files

index.php — Main page. Contains the audio player, now-playing widget, upcoming schedule section, and about section. Show information is updated here manually before each broadcast.
now_playing.php — Fetches the currently playing track from the Icecast JSON status API and returns it as HTML. Called by the frontend every 15 seconds via setInterval.

Architecture

Backend: PHP only. No Composer, no package manager, no build step.
Frontend: HTML5 UP Strata template with custom CSS additions. No npm, no webpack, no preprocessor — edit CSS directly in assets/css/main.css or inline <style> blocks.
Now-playing: index.php fetches now_playing.php via JavaScript every 15 seconds and injects the result into #now-playing. The fetch uses arrayBuffer + TextDecoder to handle the UTF-8 encoding correctly on the client side.

Icecast Integration

Stream URL: https://radio.cyberpunklibrarian.nohost.me/rfe
Status API: https://radio.cyberpunklibrarian.nohost.me/status-json.xsl

The status API returns JSON with track metadata under icestats.source. The source key may be a single object or an array depending on how many mountpoints are active; now_playing.php handles both cases.

Known Encoding Quirk

Icecast double-encodes track metadata as Latin-1 interpreted as UTF-8. The fix in now_playing.php:23-24 deliberately converts the string from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 to strip the outer encoding layer and recover the correct UTF-8 byte sequence. Do not remove or "simplify" this conversion — it is intentional and necessary for non-ASCII characters (accented names, etc.) to display correctly.

Deployment

There is no CI/CD pipeline. Deployment is manual:

Commit and push changes to the self-hosted Gitea repository.
Upload changed files to the Yunohost web server via SFTP.

There is no staging environment — changes go straight to production.

Updating Show Information

Show info lives in the #one section of index.php. Previous shows are commented out rather than deleted, so there's a history of past broadcasts in the markup. When updating for a new show, comment out the current show block and add the new one above it.

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