I wanted to give a huge thanks to people on this list for all their help as I scrambled to finish a gift in December. Thanks especially to Robert Nelson for all your help getting various bits all working together, and to Yona Appletree for last-minute mods to his LEDscape fork.
This is Podtique, an antique radio converted to play MP3 playlists by "tuning" to their frequencies:
http://blog.roderickmann.org/2015/01/podtique/
Thanks all, and Happy New Year!
AH, at first look I thought, maybe you built a low power transmitter, to “broadcast” podcasts for any nearby radio to tune in. WIll continue reading the blog later though 
Nope, it's currently entirely self-contained. Eventually it will fetch content over Wi-Fi, even play streams live, but there are no actual radio components in there.
Yep, like William said, node.js for the web server part and a decent WiFi adapter.
Cool project, great wood work!
Kudos!
Thanks!