Most people who stay with a website like part15.us are creative people who want to build, invent, discover, improve their surroundings, and bring the general universe into general compliance with the inner on.
A radio station starts from below the ground and builds upward and outward, connecting to the world in terms of inches and feet.
Once the station exists some thought goes into improving it, through programming and technology.
Soon we gather here at the website to share experience and learn what others have accomplished. This desire for advancement through cooperation lead to the organizing of the ALPB (Association of Low Power Broadcasters) which has already matured to the point of looking beyond National part 15 and wondering about international low power.
Those stations who stream on the web have already been speaking to an international audience without every knowing how many countries there are.
At the recent ALPB Meeting we were reminded that all too many locations still suffer from limited bandwidth availability, while those stations fortunate enough to enjoy high speed connections tend to stream at extra high bit rates.
Problem is that many would-be listeners can’t maintain solid connection, which may very well explain why the streaming server at our station shows listeners who connect for 10-seconds and are gone. On the one hand we think maybe they made a hasty judgement against what they heard, but just as likely they heard a choppy audio stream and gave up.
With that in mind, we have today opened a second stream running 16-kilobytes-per-second, 11.025kHz sampling rate, good even for dial-up listeners.
Our regular stream, having been set at a compromise of 24kbps, 22.05kHz, really a little too high for dial-up, but which provides the quality of the best AM radio, have today been upscaled to 48kbps, 44.1kHz, an FM sound.
What station improvements have you made, or, are planning to make?
run aac plus on your stream
run aac plus on your stream it’s meant for mobile applications and and meant to sound good on low bandwidth connections.
Will Do
I like that advice from kc8gpd, running AAC+.
I did a test run with it a while back and the sound was conspicuously better than equal bit rates on mp3, but at that time the software I used got buggy and I shut it down.
By now it’s time to try it again, so YES to the suggestion.
Carl, do you run your own
Carl, do you run your own server or do you host it somewhere else?
I always got those 10 second listeners – I think that they were bots, running around the Internet, checking out links.
Two Servers
For the streaming radio stations it is only my home computer with shoutcast server software running.
The website is out on a commercial website provider, although that’s probably a waste of money since MRAM has shown that a website can be home done.
There are bots that try to do whatever bots do.
Bots
You can prevent robots from accessing all or parts of your website by placing a text file named robots.txt in your root directory. Google “robots.txt” for details of what to put in this small file. It works.
Carl,
An attempt to access http://kdxradio.com/robots.txt came back with 404: Page not found, so I assume you don’t have a robots.txt file for your site.
Check http://www.part15.us/robots.txt to see this site’s file.
There
It’s in.
The robots.txt file is now on guard at the website.
Thank you PhilB.
Robots Some More
Now that my website is fixed with robots.txt, the file that stops robots, I am wondering about the home computer where the streaming radio is accessed by the world via dedicated ports.
I do see bot attempts logged on the streamer monitor, often from microsoft. What are those bots able to achieve by attempting to log onto the stream server?
I also notice that microsoft seems to have bolstered their bot queries by following it with another connection that accesses the server in the way a player would, but is not a player.
One thought is to attach the robots.txt command file to the server command file.
But first I’ll look for your consultation.
There
Carl,
I’m sorry for not being more clear about the robots file. The robots.txt file needs to be tailored specifically to each web site because each site runs unique software and has a unique sub-directory structure. Normally, I think you would want your site to be crawled to get your site on the search engines, but you may not want certain directories or files to appear on search engines. You can disallow certain pages and whole sub-directories as you wish.
You copied the part15.us/robots.txt. I only posted it for viewing as an example. It is specific to the part15.us software structure.
Here is the file from my sstran site: http://sstran.com/robots.txt It simply disallows two whole directories (along with their sub-directories) and several html files. I disallowed the html files because those pages contain descriptions I wrote to help customers who aren’t familiar with PVC and copper pipe joints. I did this because those pages were appearing on Google when people searched for things like “how to connect PVC pipe fittings” along with pages from professional plumbing experts. I was getting a ton of hits from the general public, most of whom don’t even know what a transmitter or antenna is! It took many months for those hits to die off.
Me Bot
Like a robot I am learning in unpredicted ways. What? Me neither.
Thank you PhilB for pointing the way to prepare a robots.txt file.
I’ll request some brain time in my head and figure out what the script should be for my website.
Robot Day
PhilB, your first posting about robots.txt files was complete, in that it included the direction to google the subject to learn how it works, but I grabbed the sample file, installed it on my website, and figured that I’d google it at a later time.
As it turned out I didn’t even have it in the root directory, but today is robot day and I am running a full home school college symposium on the subject, not exactly sure what a symposium is.
Here is a guideline for starters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
Report Card
The report card I give myself as the self instructor of robots.txt is a gold star which keeps falling from my forehead.
I learned that my root file cannot be written to, and the directory above that does not become accessed by incoming traffic because it is a switching point to two different web domains I run, but putting the robots.txt file in the directory reached by using the web address does the trick.
I have another domain name that I haven’t yet assigned to anywhere, so it defaults to a “Under Construction” page provided by my web service provider. It yields a very informative robots.txt file designed to block all bots except those from google, msn and yahoo. I would like to make an open invitation to my preferred search engine, StartPage. You can go looking for that robots file here:
https://worldroundradio.com/robots.txt