New look Zingzing

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Zingzing Users,

You may of noticed, Zingzing has received a face lift. I hope the new interface will be quicker, more intuitive to use and less intrusive. Gone away is the detailed view and in it’s place is a vertical (newspaper style) view that should tickle a lot of people that are used to viewing their listings in that format. I have put the genre filters behind a new “advanced” tab as these weren’t getting used a huge amount to clear up some room in the interface and allow the site to work on netbook screens, no problem.

Did I mention you can use the site on an iPad now?? Oops

But..

Now I know how Facebook felt when they updated their site a while back!! You either love it or you hate it. The same holds true for the new look Zingzing. I had my reservations at first about the change (and it’s my site!!) but after staring at old and new side by site, and A LOT of testing, and a lot of feedback, a few designers later.. I think the change was the right thing to do.

I tried to keep the colours in as much as I could and will probably try to worm them back in a bit more as the design evolves..but text on coloured backgrounds caused problems for some visitors and was probably a design mistake that became de facto for many other users.

Hope you like the changes and let me know what you think (good and bad) so I can make it even better!!

Marco from Zingzing

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Zingzing is Getting an Upgrade

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

My new toy arrived in the post… and I’ve been busy moving Zingzing to the new hardware.

Quad Core Intel Xeon, 2.83GHz
4GB Memory
73GB, SAS, 15K RPM Hard Drive (Hot Plug)
SAS 6iR internal RAID Controller
Redundant Power Supply (Hot Plug)

This will really help with some of the more "expensive" features like related programmes and text based searching. Shame I can’t keep it in the house..

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Server Move

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

If you are reading this, then you are viewing zingzing on my brand spanking new server! There were a couple of small glitches when I switched the switch late last night. Hopefully these have all been cleared up but if you do experience a problem, please report it and I will get right to fixing it.

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Genre Dropdown Added to Search Toolbar

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

You can now choose from any of the available genres when searching for programmes on zingzing by using the “More..” dropdown. It seems like such an obvious thing to be able to do but dead tricky to implement! I have categorized (by hand) the top 500 programmes but there are still many many more to go so please be patient while they are being added to the database.

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Channel Five To Join Freesat

Monday, November 17th, 2008

I am very happy to announce that Five will be available from tomorrow on Freesat, so I have added it to the zingzing listings. The Freesat offering is really starting to look like an attractive offer and I am super tempted by some of the HD boxes out there. Can’t wait until the sales..

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Geek Stuff

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

OK, if you are not the slightest bit technical, you may want to turn away now.

Anybody that knows me knows I am mad about TV Listings. I do it in my day job and I run this website in my (ever diminishing) spare time. I like to keep a keen eye on the progress of similar sites and noticed today that none of the top ten sites use valid XHTML markup. Shocking.

15 min later… Almost all of the big ticket websites I frequent don’t validate. The only exception to this was the BBC homepage. It’s crazy and sad that the art of creating beautiful XHTML seems to of got lost.

The reality is that creating valid markup cuts down on support and testing costs. Pages load quicker, without errors and users are happy.. Happy Users = Increased Success.

I am vary proud to say zinging uses valid XHTML.

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Satellite Channels and Keyboard Access

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

I have added a Satellite option under the channel options menu. This should start to cater for those of you out there with Sky. Because of the complexity of Sky’s packages, I have omitted options to specify your package for the moment while I figure out the best way of tackling it.

Also, and this is a really cool one… you can now control zingzing by using just your keyboard. Great when you are sat in front of the telly. Let me know what you think.

Checkout the new zingzing access keys.

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Regional TV Listings Now Live!

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Hope everyone is well. I know is quite a basic thing for a TV listings site to have but the programming behind it was an insane task to get perfect and bug free. That said, if anybody is having difficulties changing regions or packages, please let me know and I will get a fix in. Happy viewing.

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Speed Improvements – Search

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

I have made a number of under the hood improvements to the speed of the site, the most notable being free text searches and grid rendering times. Hopefully this will free up some resources for much more complex / relevant searches.

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New Provider Options – Freesat, HD

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

This weekend, I have mainly been improving the quality of the data on the grid. Found a couple of bugs in the process so this was well worth the effort. I also added Freesat and HD options to the provider menu on the main grid which will make a lot of people happy!

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