Shoutzor 2012

Shoutz0r is more than just a web-application to me. It's kind of a tradition! For quite few years now, around the start of summer holidays in the Netherlands, the youth-centered volunteer organization I'm a part of has organized a LAN-party.

Starting out at around twenty, through the years, growing to over sixty people, there is a certain structured chaos that's very cozy. At the first LAN-party there was the problem of everyone wanting to play their music, ending in a battl of rap versus trance.

I decided to do something about it. Since the second LAN-party I introduced a web interface that was connected to a stash of music that would be played loud through a central speaker system. Players could visit the web-interface, upload their music and choose it. Their song would end up in a queue of epicness. Et voila, no more annoying mixing of songs!

Since that year, every year, I have created an incarnation of this idea with as requirement to use a differentl language, or programming framework to implement it. This year, I used Ruby on Rails and lots of HTML5 for the oldskool fire effect you see.

Key features:

• Ruby on Rails
• Indexing of songs based on file system notifications
• Windows Share to upload music
• Personalized interface
• Fire effect with messages (now playing song ...) and event-branding
• Playlist prediction (when will my song play?)
• Stability!

The code is open and free under LGPL license, check it out on my github account in this repository.