Coded, Designed, Animated, and Edited by Michael Cafarelli
Created with:
Arecibo Radio seeks the odd, the strange, the outlandish, the unknown, and the oft-disregarded. We focus on underground and niche programs dedicated to certain cultures, communities, and forums that often have deep roots and ties with such communities.
- Arecibo Radio's Mission Statement
Arecibo Radio was an internet radio station and website catering to video-game-music, chiptunes, and related music and culture. The station had many weekly shows which regularly drew dozens of live listeners. On occasion, some shows also hosted listening parties for albums on release day, in which the album's artist would be interviewed by the host in between the tracks. These listening parties drew as many as 300+ live listeners.
Arecibo Radio also live-streamed many music festivals, including Pulsewave NYC, 8Static Festival, and MAGFest. MAGFest in particular was quite an undertaking, as there were multiple stages with bands playing at the same time that required a different "mountpoint" (or "station") for each stage. This allowed listeners to connect to different mountpoints on Arecibo Radio and listen to whatever band they liked best out of those available.
As Co-Founder, Owner, and day-to-day Operations Manager, I handled the concept, design, and execution of the brand's logo, animated logo intro, business cards for each show host, t-shirts and other merchandise.
I also completely designed and developed the website from the ground up. All HTML, CSS, and JQuery code was written by hand. The final version of the site used an AJAX-based concept, where once on the site, every page a user went to afterwards was loaded "inline", which means it was loaded directly into the page without a page refresh.
This was a crucial feature to implement, because many users listened to the radio station via flash players embeded on the website. If the website's pages hadn't been loaded inline, the page would refresh on every click, and the music would stop. By basing the website on an AJAX system, users could browse every page of the website and never stop listening to the radio.
Although the radio station stopped broadcasting in 2015, the website has been brought back to its original state, and can be viewed here.