We Built a Free Public Radio Portal in a Weekend

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting closed its doors. The stations are still on the air — so we built a place to listen to them.

On January 6, 2026, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve the organization.

However, Congress had rescinded the $1.1 billion earmarked for it. After 57 years distributing funding to more than 1,500 local public radio and TV stations, CPB wound down. This shift affects Free Public Internet Radio.

That’s the news version. Here’s the version that got me out of my chair: I have a friend who works at a public radio station on the campus of an HBCU. His station was one of the ones affected.

I kept thinking about a listing I’d seen once — a map of every station CPB had funded or supported. The organization was going away. The list didn’t have to. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine keeps copies of pages long after the pages themselves come down.

The plan was simple: pull the archived station list. Recover each station’s logo and website, find the live streams, and put all behind one player.

If the funding was gone, the audience didn’t have to be Free Public Internet Radio.

I built it with Claude over a weekend. It’s live at Hodgson.ai/radio, it’s free, and there’s nothing to sign up for.

What actually shipped

Not a landing page with a promise on it. A working product:

Hundreds of live streams, browsable by category — HBCU, Public, College, World, Jazz, Lo-fi, Classical, Ambient, News, Electronic, Reggae, and Metal.
A persistent player that follows you down the page, so browsing never interrupts what’s playing.
Real filtering — search by name, narrow by country, or set a minimum bitrate if you’re picky about audio quality.
Station cards with actual metadata: logo, country, genre, bitrate, secure-stream indicator, and a direct link out to the station’s own site.
Favorites and live tune-in counts, so you can find your way back and see what everyone else is listening to.
A “Surprise me” button, because sometimes the best station is one you’d never have searched for.

Why this is on our blog and not just my Substack

Strip away the cause and look at the work order. Scrape archived pages that no longer exist on the live web. Normalize hundreds of inconsistent station records. Resolve and validate stream URLs, most of which are broken or redirected. Build a responsive audio player, a filter system, favorites, and a usage counter. Ship it to production.

That’s a real project. Two years ago it’s a six-week engagement with a scoping call, a proposal, and a developer. It took two days, and the only person on it was me.

The interesting part isn’t that an AI wrote code. Everyone knows that by now.

Moreover, the interesting part is what happens to the gap between ‘I wonder if you could…’.

A URL you can send someone changes how ideas are evaluated.

When that gap collapses from six weeks to a weekend, the math on which ideas are worth pursuing changes. This shift matters for Free Public Internet Radio.

Every business has a list of these. The internal tool nobody could justify the budget for. The microsite for a campaign that only runs three weeks. The report sales has been asking for since last spring. The integration between two systems that don’t talk. These aren’t hard problems — they’re problems that were never worth the old price.

They’re worth it now. That’s the whole thesis of how we work: use AI to build the things that were previously stuck in the “someday” column, and ship them while they still matter.

Go listen. The portal is free and public at Hodgson.ai/radio. If you find a station you love, visit its site and support it directly — most of them need it more than ever.

Have a “someday” project?

Additionally, if you’ve got an idea that’s been sitting in the too-expensive column, let’s talk.

It may cost a lot less than it used to.