Playing catch-up again!

Hi FoF users!

I've had an email from a new user Ben to say that the listings were down again. I then noticed when checking the site that of what was there, a lot of movies were only partly filled in, missing details (like plot!) and that pictures were pretty haphazard. Just to mention this again: I don't get to use the site much myself any more (can't afford the tv license now I'm a mature student) and I rely on you guys letting me know when things don't look right! Just fire off an email, keep it monosyllabic if you want, and I'll try and sort out the problem.

Merry Christmas and another happy new year! Never thought this site would have made it this far, so fingers crossed ;)

George

Minor updates

Sorry about the missing listings this week. This shouldn't be an issue again for a while. It's nice to hear from some of you when the data goes missing - I can't even get Freeview where I'm living right now, so I'm glad there are people getting some benefit from this site!

I've tried to make the Week view page more useful today. You can click a film and jump to its entry on the day it shows, be it the top or the bottom of the page. It's not ideal as you then have to use 'back' if you want to return to the weekly listings. I might have a go at using Ajax instead to update the Week page with more details on-demand, if I get really bored... which I might :)

Lastly, the via-email movie listings foundered as neither of the services I tried were sending them out in time to be useful. I tried, but couldn't get anywhere with it, sorry.

New search functionality!

There's been a subtle change to filmsonfreeview.com today as you may have noticed - you can now search the week's films by actor, director, title and channel. Names of people and channels in movie listings are now hyperlinks to the appropriate search results, thus saving you from having to copy and paste them into the search box.

I run this site as a hobby, and as I'm mentally preparing to study Computer Science at university from next month as a mature student, I thought spending a couple of days implementing search functions would be a nice little project. Now would be a good time to send me your ideas for other improvements, as I'm sure I'll be pretty busy soon!

Another new feature, a signup box for daily emails with films listings, has been pulled at the last second. I won't put it up until I can be sure the service is reliable, but that will only be a matter of days.

New listings feed!

As promised a long time ago, I've swapped out the old, jumbled RSS feed for a new, clean one. Why not embed it on your iGoogle homepage, add it to your iPhone's feeds, or just subscribe in your usual reader and cut out the middle man. If you don't know what feeds are or why they might make your life easier, try this video, RSS in Plain English:

Upcoming listings issue

There is likely to be a problem with listings being updated for several days. We apologise, and hope to be able to restore full service soon.

Reflections fixed!!

An incredibly long-standing bug has finally been fixed! It affected movie box-art reflections on the home page and in the listings. In Firefox and other browsers, there has always been a little gap between an image and its reflection, whereas in IE7 there was no gap. I'd been assuming that this was an odd little issue with reflection.js, the script I've used to generate the reflections since this site launched. Now I find out it was my fault all along! I made a really silly error with the CSS that I won't go into now. This site has been a learning process from the start, and suffice to say I won't make that mistake again. Enjoy the reflections!

Reliability of listings greatly improved!

As previously hoped, Films on Freeview now has a working new system for updating its movie listings, meaning that you should no longer see blank days on the site. We hope that you'll now be able to trust on FoF for your viewing needs!

Previous issues were two-fold: the update process was manually triggered and lengthy, and sometimes came across problem titles that required fixing and meant doing the whole thing again. The new listings system handles these problem titles automatically, and thus can be scheduled to run automatically, with greater frequency and no baby-sitting.

This is still a pet project for me, but do get in touch if you have any suggestions, don't be a stranger to the forum, and tell your friends! George

Experiencing technical difficulties...

Thanks to Alan for pointing out the current lack of listings. The bad news is that I'm having trouble getting them back up and it may take a few days; the good news is that if successful, the update process should be vastly upgraded and make missing listings a thing of the past.

I've been busy lately, but the new-and-improved RSS feeds that I've mentioned before should be coming soon too. The current feed is pretty rough and jumbled (an external service tries to 'guess' how to present the page as a feed item), where the new one should be clean and precise. There'll be one for tomorrow's films as well as one for today's... if you can think of any other useful ways of regularly receiving listings, I'm all ears.

update: We're back, but the update process is still very shaky. I'm still scratching my head trying to figure it out. It's doubtful you'll reliably be able to see the full week ahead for a few days, but if I do work it out, the site will be much more frequently updated from then on.

Missing data

Apologies for the lack of data on the site - listings etc - this has been noticed and will be corrected in the next couple of days. On the plus side, we have some vastly improved RSS feeds in the pipeline so you have today and tomorrow's detailed film listings come to you!

Listings missing

Apologies about the missing listings; we're having technical trouble here at FoF Towers. With luck we'll be working again in the next couple of hours. Unfortunately, this gap in film listings has only just been brought to our attention after nearly a week of incomplete data, so next time things go wrong, please let us know sooner!

Even more updates

Ok, so it appears I lied - I've added a couple of new view modes to the site, but I swear, no more effort from now on! I checked, this site made $0.70 last month in ad revenue, and I need to focus on other projects. Anyway, now you can preview the week's films purely by box art - like you were looking at the racks of DVDs in Blockbusters. I thought that would be a cool application for the site when I first got images working, and it turned out well; it's not terribly useful, but kinda fun, I think.

The second new type of view is a narrowing-down of the picks of the week - it got a bit tedious skipping the old films you'd never heard of, so now you can browse just the modern movies... or if you prefer, just the classics. No more updates though now, I promise!

New Year updates

The front page has had a minor makeover, and an RSS feed for daily movie listings has been added for your convenience - it's a bit dodgy as images seem to end up in the wrong places, but it does give you all the information you need. Unless we start getting more visitors though, I'm afraid it's just not worth adding new, fully-functioning features to the site when there are other projects to be worked on.

If you have a blog or are active in a forum and find Films on Freeview useful, now would be a good time to start telling people! The site will continue to be updated with listings, but plans for adding functionality will be put on hold for now.