Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

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..

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.

Great news for Freesat HD subscribers, I have added ITV1 HD schedule to Zingzing. Please bear in mind that ITV only broadcast a handful of programmes in HD so most of the day is currently blank. Still, quite handy to have all freesat HD listings in one place. Let’s hope we start seeing more Freesat HD content soon..

Click to find TV programmes using our easy to use interface.

This weeks ITV HD programmes (Updated automatically)

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!