What in da Blu HELL is this?

[as4]

2FM new website is SHITE! What's all this black graphics bloat? Just as well I didn't pay for any of this with mah licence fee.
Christ the site is shit. I had to go back to rte.ie/radio just to get a schedule.
This is bollox. Even if it is powered by "catch" (catch.fm) they fail hard, very hard.
Bring back the old site - the one where you can see what you're doing, fer da luv of christ.

http://www.rte.ie/2fm points to http://2fm.rte.ie/ if you haven't seen the damage

I have shpoken,

[playthatbeat]

yeh, it's a bit of a touchy subject round here TBH.. I'm not at all keen on the catch.fm thing, it gives me the creeps for 2 reasons: firstly it's about selling pop music to kids, and that i think is a shady business even at the best of times. i once said on air that the recent bout of bloated hiphop/Rn'B had no lasting value for end-buyers, and that they could not revisit any of the music as it's so shite, unlike REAL music that lasts forever.. this can be applied to alot of the fodder that comes & goes on the radio - great for the moment, like chewing gum but not intended to change lives or be artistic in any way - and i don't see how you make friends & influence people by selling them something with such a short life - at any price. The other thing that bugs me is the possibility of the whole station becoming a big QVC surrounding Gerry Ryan. Think about it - 2FM could turn into 1 big show, with infomercials all around that 1 big show! Like ITV runs fuc*ing QUIZ CALL all night instead of b-movies & the JAMES WHALE RADIO SHOW and THE HITMAN & HER etc. Think about it. How soon will all stations be like this? with a flagship show and lots of padding trying to sell you stuff? (ITV 1 anyone? Corrie + ????? etc.)

Anyway, the internets have spoken on this: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showt...did=2055521324 - looks like some people are sore they didnt get the gig TBH, but some valid points.

[as4]

That boards.ie thread _is_ an interesting read alright. The site cost 230K allegedly? Very bad. Seeing as it's up now and time and money have been invested in it, it's pretty unlikely it'll be removed at this stage.
Overall though it renders pretty badly under firefox (also google chrome too I see from the boards thread).
If it looked well I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it and it would only be a matter of time before I got used to it.

Important point: catch.fm are the site designers. They also did spin 1038's site as well, and here's the shizznit: the spin site renders _waaaaay_ better than the 2fm site, so what's that about? Ironically, the flash layout on catch.fm (the designer's themselves) also fails - I cannot click the "contct us" link at all, have to look at the page source code and type the link in manually. Hah!

[playthatbeat]

Yes they are both a bit shakey on anything other then windows/IE.. on lunix/opera my weaponz of choize, it looks terrible. FF improves things to the point of clickability, but the text falling out of it's boxes is very poor show indeed.. I tried to look at my page on it at work the first week, and it froze my machine (XP Corp SP3/IE6) so i haven't been back since.

Indeed the 230k is alot of $$ for a cut n' shut of flash galleries, an offsite e-commerce portal, some scraping script and, er, a CMS of sorts. I'm not counting the blogging bit, as wired magazine already put the ribbons on that last year

Well, it's early days, so i expect they will introduce the 'killer app' that will get the site turning over in due coarse. I for one cannot wait for this!!!

[playthatbeat]

also:

98.catch.fm

spin.catch.fm

spinsw.catch.fm

2fm.catch.fm

beat.catch.fm

today.catch.fm

[as4]

Well, it's early days, so i expect they will introduce the 'killer app' that will get the site turning over in due coarse. I for one cannot wait for this!!!

The killer app is called 'format'. Cillit Server Bang - and the content is gone. If I was you, I'd poke the raid array right in the parity drive and re-initialise the lot