MyTVShows Blog

Hello!

This post is just to give all of you a status update on the new version of MyTVShows. As you know, we have been working on a completely new version of the website with lots of new features.

Unfortunately, during the last few months we didn’t had much time to work on it, so the development has stopped. We still don’t know when we will have the time to start working again, but we promise that we will do our best to get this new version out.

In the meantime, the current website is still working (sometimes it becomes a bit slow, but at least it’s working). We know there are a few bugs and some things don’t work as everyone would expect (like automatically adding new episodes to your library), but we are not going to make much more changes to this version. All the new features will be implemented on the new version.

We hope you can still enjoy MyTVShows and we will try to make it even better in the future… as soon as we have some free time to do it

Although we are still working on the new version of MyTVShows (wich has suffered a huge delay due to the lack of time we have to work on it), we are lauching (a kind of) an API.

It’s not a complete API, but just something to help you integrate MyTVShows in your own projects for the time being, that is, until we have something better…

It’s quite simple, go to your profile on MyTVShows and generate an API Key.
Then you can use the following URLs to get or post information:

To check if an episode is marked as seen or unseen
http://www.mytvshows.org/api/get_status/[API Key]/[show]/[season]/[episode]

To mark an episode as Seen
http://www.mytvshows.org/api/mark_seen/[API Key]/[show]/[season]/[episode]

To mark an episode as Unseen
http://www.mytvshows.org/api/mark_unseen/[API Key]/[show]/[season]/[episode]

To get the current episode rating
http://www.mytvshows.org/api/get_rating/[API Key]/[show]/[season]/[episode]

And finally, to rate an episode
http://www.mytvshows.org/api/rate/[API Key]/[show]/[season]/[episode]/[rating]

Please Note, the [show] must be the same name used on the show URL, for example:
http://www.mytvshows.org/show/bigbangtheory (The Big Bang Theory)
http://www.mytvshows.org/api/mark_seen/ABCD1234/bigbangtheory/4/4/

Warning: Never publish your API Key. This key allows marking episodes as seen/unseen on your account. So, to avoid that others can change the status of your episodes, you should keep this API Key private and only use it on services that you trust.

As you may know, we are working on a completelly new version of MyTVShows. This new version will deal with the current performance problems we are having and add some long awaited functionalities to the website.

We still don’t have any deadline for the launch and it may take a little longer that we predicted a few weeks ago, but here’s a sneak peek of the revamped user interface

You can keep giving us feedback here: http://getsatisfaction.com/mytvshows

Some of you may have noticed that MyTVShows was down for most of the weekend. We had to do some maintenance to try and speed up the pages and to optimize our database (which can take a very long time).

After a few days of optimization (those scripts really take a long time) we noticed that the database was running a lot faster

However, we noticed that in some pages it still took a long time to load (and they slowed down the whole site for all users). So, in order to keep the website running smoothly, we decided to temporarily disable the following pages:

• New/Upcoming episodes: to check for new and/or upcoming episodes, please check them individualy for each show (you can see the upcoming episodes on the main show page and the new episodes on the season page, right after the episodes you already have);
• Timelines: we disabled the global timeline, the friends timeline and your timeline;

As you may now, we are working on a complete redesign of MyTVShows. Until we have the new version ready, these pages will stay disabled.

In the new version, the new episodes will be automatically added to your library, so we won’t be needing the new episodes page

If you are a new user, you may be wondering, “why is this site so slow?”.

If you are a regular user you may be asking, “why did MyTVShows become so slow?”.

The answer is simple. In the last weeks we had a major increase of traffic (over 800% more users and 1800% more pageviews than we had before). In less than a week we had and increase of the number of episodes we track from 3 million episodes to 7 million episodes. It took us a year to reach 3 million episodes, and just a week to reach 7 million episodes. At it’s still growing every day

Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared for such an increase of traffic and it all started running (very) slowly. We made a few changes to try and make the site a little faster, and although it helped us keep the site online until now, it clearly isn’t enough.

So we made the decision to rewrite all the code from scratch to increase the overall performance. This process may take some time (we hope it will be complete in a couple of months) and the site may go down a few times (i guess you’ve all seen the “grey screen” a few times) so, please bear with us until we fix everything

We have high expectations for the new version of the website and, when the time is right, we will unveil some important announcements about the future of MyTVShows

Keep tuned in.

We’re happy to announce an increase of almost 800% of MyTVShows users during the past two days. Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared for such an increase in such a small time frame.

The performance issues are already being addressed and should be taken care off soon.

We’re very thankful to have you on board with us and we’re sorry about the inconvenience.

For those who where having troubles with the password recovery, we have now fixed a bug that was causing the confirmation code malfunction. It should be working fine now.

After a few weeks of development, we are updating MyTVShows with a bunch of new features, starting with a new logo (courtesy of Quodis). The old logo was more related to movies than it was with TV or TV Shows, so our friends at Quodis designed our new logo based on the RGB of the TV Screen (if you look closely to your TV Screen you’ll see a bunch of Red, Green and Blue dots).

Other new features include:

• Friendly URLs: you can now navigate through all pages with simpler URLs like http://www.mytvshows.org/show/prisonbreak/ or http://www.mytvshows.org/user/ivogomes/ (the older URLs still work, so that you wont lose your bookmarks);
• Layout improvements: some pages were completelly changed and we made many tweaks and improvements here and there;
• Timelines: You can now check your timeline (your recently watched episodes); your friends timeline; and the global timeline. You can also subscribe the RSS Feed for a user’s timeline;
• Stats: You can now check who are the most addicted users;
• Twitter On/Off: If you configured your Twitter account on MyTVShows, you can now turn the notifications on and off with just one click;
• Internet Explorer: MyTVShows should work ok on IE7 and IE8 (we wont have support for IE6 and lower). Known issues: the language selection menu is still buggy in IE;
• New languages: We now have another language available: Slovenian! We will also have Spanish and Polish soon;
• Microformats: We added some microformats to the show pages. If you have a browser that supports microformats, you can automatically subscribe the calendar for your TV Shows;
• Many small changes:
  • Selecting all seasons when importing a new Show;
  • Asking for your current password when changing to a new one (for security reasons);
  • Better support for browsers with JavaScript turned off;
  • New “about” page with all the credits;
  • Added the option to mark all episodes as unseen;
  • Some speed improvements on loading images and JavaScript;

Hope you like it

When you add a new Show, if you misspeled it’s name or entered a diferent name than the original one, we now provide a few suggestions so that you can add the propper show to your database.

Hopefully, this will prevent users from adding duplicate shows with diferent names like “Reaper / The Reaper” or “Big Bang Theory / The Big Bang Theory”.