Another Year of AzuraCast: Thank you!!!

As we get ready to take on 2019, first I wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has supported me through this Patreon. As some of you are aware, I'm going through some significant financial trouble this winter, and the support of the donors on here and through our Ko-Fi and Paypal pages has made a HUGE difference in my ability to pay for living essentials like rent and groceries. Every penny of your donations has gone to make a direct impact on my ability to continue developing the free and open-source software that powers AzuraCast.

Throughout 2018, we've been working very hard to make AzuraCast more powerful, more reliable and more usable for stations of every type right out of the box. Just as a quick summary, here are some of the major accomplishments we've been able to make this year:

- We added an innovative new "Web DJ" tool, based on Liquidsoap's Webcaster.js, which lets you broadcast live to your station directly from your browser, with no extra software required.

- Installations can now automatically check for updates, and administrators will see updates and other critical announcements on their dashboard whenever they log in.

- You can integrate with Twitter, Discord, Slack, TuneIn and other third-party services, automatically sending them "web hook" updates when certain aspects of your station change.

- Our project got a beautiful new mascot, Azura Ruisselante, thanks to the amazingly talented artist TysonTanX. (You can see her on our new homepage below)

- We rolled out a brand new theme with significant usability improvements.

- We launched our new homepage at https://azuracast.com/

- You can now use the same station to broadcast both locally and to remote relays.

- We added support for custom metadata on any media. 

- Thanks to the new plugin infrastructure, you can extend AzuraCast's functionality without needing to modify the core application's code at all.

- We've started the process of migrating all AzuraCast functionality to be possible via our RESTful API, so any authenticated third-party client can manage the system. We've also made significant changes "under the hood" that prepare us for allowing external storage like Amazon S3 to power your station's media.

- We created and rolled out a customized Icecast-KH fork that adds extra functionality and makes proxying work with Docker containers. We've also expanded our contribution to the open-source software community by splitting our "Now Playing" library and our core framework tools (AzuraCore) into standalone open-source frameworks.

All of these features are included out of the box with every up-to-date AzuraCast installation, regardless of installation method. Thousands of stations now are running on AzuraCast software, and all of them are able to take advantage of these awesome new features with a simple update.

We've also seen a huge rise in the project's popularity this year. In May, we announced excitedly that we had hit 200 stars on GitHub. Now, we're at 340 and climbing!

This is also the first year I've been assisted significantly by other contributors to the project. Namely, CodeSteele and Vaalyn have offered their assistance with development, support and project management, and I'm immensely grateful to both of them for their help.

All in all, it has been a very productive and successful year for AzuraCast. We're looking forward to an excellent coming year, and we couldn't do it without your help. Thank you all so very much!