Homecoming is approaching fast, with the usual worries of what to wear and who to take. But this year, students can hope to avoid worrying about the quality of the music: a music request website has been created.
“I am excited to be able to help choose the music this year. Last year was slum but it might be good because students know what students want to listen to,” junior Nevin Thankachen said.
The class council announced the idea during its meeting on September 11. The program started September 15 and went online October 2. The idea of the site is for students to go to a link via the Springbrook homepage and login to the site using the same login that is used to log into the computer.
Students will be able to fill out a form that will have three blanks where students may fill in any song title from Lil Wayne’s “Got Money” to David Bowie’s “Space Odyssey.”
Farther down on the page are three more blanks where students fill in three artists of there choice followed by a scroll window in which to choose a genre of music. The list includes hip hop, R&B, Rock, Classic rock, Go-Go, Salsa and Caribbean.
“I think it is cool, but that it may be too much of a hassle,” junior Anna Suh said.
“We have done some sweet coding (a php script in technical terms) that is going to make it so we will not need someone to tally all the votes because that would be impractical. The server will process all the votes and tell us what was most popular,” website co-creator senior Saqib Ashraf said.
At one point it seemed that, while a good idea, the website would not go up because without the counter. The responsibility of counting up which songs had been requested would fall on the class council. This would have been tedious work with the rest of the Homecoming preparations it may have been implausible.
“Coding is a lot of work and coding in a tally counter is very difficult and takes a lot of time. Therefore it took us longer to get online than we would have liked, but the main problem is [the] spelling of song titles. Ballin and Balling would be two different [beacause] tallies and apostrophes or a stray space would completely change the count.” Ashraf said.
With the site online, the key is for students to try itout. The song list should vary with all kinds of tastes hopefully bringing in a larger crowd of students to the dance.
Students are to note that there is no guarantee that the songs requested here will be played at Homecoming. Remember, songs and artists requested need to follow MCPS guidelines (no drugs or swearing).