Once again, I should be writing lots of small blog posts instead of big ones but oh well.

Three big things have happened for us recently, the long awaited article about UVB-76 has been released in this months Wired Magazine, Laid has created a radio stream that follows our station schedule and we have finally got our database up and running!

So first the UVB-76 article in October 2011's issue of Wired Magazine. Around late September 2010 before priyom.org was founded our community was starting to gather around Laids stream and IRC channel as well as the UVB-76 forum. Several of the active forum posters were contacted by Peter Savodnik most of who went on to found the priyom.org team. None of us are directly quoted or mentioned in the article, which is of course a little disappointing, but it is interesting to see our words rewritten and little mentions of things we discussed while being interviewed, so still satisfying none the less. Its also good to see the regular big names in the number station scene were spoken to as well. Go check it out, its well worth a read.

Prijemnik

Another first for our Radio Jedi Master Laid, who really seems to be racking up several "firsts" in the short-wave scene. He has created "Prijemnik" an on-line radio stream, that follows our station schedule. So if you don't have a radio to hand, but your on-line you can listen to number stations any time of day! The stream is on our radio streams page and on Laids UVB-76 blog, which gets a fair amount of traffic so the stream is getting about 5 constant listeners at this stage, its great to see more and more people being exposed to the number stations scene. Were really pleased to have got everything working in time for the Wired article as well as that will bring a lot of new people to listen to our fascinating little world.

Heh, the database. For me its seemed a bit like the Foo Fighters song "Big me": "Well I talked about it, put it on, never was it true". Yes, the database. The whole point of creating priyom was to have a database in the first place, we didn't really intend to put priyom live to the public until we had that up and running, but the site looked good and the CMS was easy to use, so up priyom went. The database was discussed and designed, put off, reconsidered but slowly it began to take shape. We have several very experienced programmers, sys-admins and hackers on the priyom team so the database we have designed is not a single table to dump all the messages in. It has become a fully-normalised relational design with great flexibility. We have spent a long time considering the different styles of stations and the best way to organise them especially considering the need to analyse relationships between stations. Now we have the back end server up and running and most of our data entered by the team, it was time to get the front end implementation done. I took a few days holiday and got coding. By the end of the second day the s28/UVB-76 2010 and 2011 pages were being rendered from our database! No more hand adding the messages to a web page.

This is of course the first run and we only have a few pages running at the moment, but over the next few days most of the number stations pages will be converted over to our database system and soon we shall have the long promised submissions page on the site. If you hear a station, jump on the site and submit the message. All coming soon! Once again, Priyom.org is growing, come along for the ride.

Webweasel