MyTVShows Blog

This year, I’m going to dedicate all my free time to work on MyTVShows 2.0

It’s been 2 years since we had to shut down the sign up form due to some scalability and performance problems. Unfortunately, during that time, I haven’t been able to work on fixing MyTVShows as I wanted, and time went by. I’ve tried  to create a new version from scratch, but it never went past 30% of completion, again, due to lack of time.

So, this year, my goal is to have MyTVShows back up again, and add all those most wanted features you’ve all been asking for.

In order to open registrations as soon as possible, I’m going to focus on having the basic and most fundamental features working for everyone (adding shows and marking episodes as seen/unseen). All the other features, like the friends list, statistics, timelines, etc will be added later.

Of course, I’ll also have to fix the scalability problems and try to incorporate some new features like adding the episodes automatically and add notifications for new seasons of the shows you’re following.

I’m also considering ditching theTVDB.com and moving to TVRage as our source of data. It seems TVRage is a bit more stable than a user generated database like theTVDB.com (which keeps adding duplicated episodes).

So, I hope I can accomplish this as soon as possible, but don’t expect anything to be ready in just a month or two. It will probably take some time to do all the work, and I’m still going to do it on my free time.

Wish me luck

* Quote from Professor Farnsworth on Futurama

The last few days we had some problems with the Twitter integration and your seen episodes weren’t being tweeted to your accounts. We managed to find what was causing this and everything should be fine now.

The problem was on the service we were using for the URL shortening of the TV Shows (http://to.ly). So, for now, we disabled it and all the tweets should be working (but without the URL to the show).

For our Google Chrome users, you can now install MyTVShows app on your browser for faster access to the website. The MyTVShows app is under the “Entertainment” category on the Chrome Web Store, but you can just search for “mytvshows” to find it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore

Right.

So the database optimization is now finished. It took almost a week to optimize our 23 million episodes. But that’s not all.

With the database optimized, it’s now time to start optimizing some code and some slow queries. Some of them are already done, like the “Unseen Episodes” and the “New Episodes” pages. They should feel a bit quicker now and hopefully they wont clog all the server resources when we have a lot of users online. Fingers crossed.

We are now recalculating the total time you spent watching all your episodes. It’s way faster now, and there is a new “refresh” link next to it so that you can recount your totals whenever you feel it’s not correct.

We will continue this optimization during the next few days.

Hello there!

As you may have noticed in the last couple of weeks, MyTVShows has been even slower then it used to be. While we don’t come up with the new version (that’s being rewritten from scratch), we are going to make some changes to the current version.

First of all, we are making some changes to our database in order to improve the performance. We have a lot of data (more than 23 million episodes) that we need to optimize. And, to do it on such a large number of episodes, we are doing it slowly. It may take some days (maybe a whole week) before everything is ready. We are currently at 30% in this process.

Then, we will have to change some code, to make the database queries faster. Hopefully this will be a quick fix once all the database optimizations are done.

We will also be changing some things on the website to improve the performance. For instance, the “unseen episodes” page currently lists all of your unseen episodes. If you had like 10.000 unseen episodes, we would list all those episodes, making the site to become very slow for you and everyone else. We are now limiting this list to only 500 episodes (200 on the mobile version). So, if you have more than 500 unseen episodes, please go to the corresponding show/season page to manage them.

The public profile page of each user now shows only his/her current shows instead of showing also the archived ones.

While we are optimizing the database tables, we are also cleaning the duplicated episodes and “invisible” episodes (the ones that you can’t see on your library but you keep getting the message saying you still have unaired episodes for that show/season). We are being very careful not to delete anything that we shouldn’t. If you think we deleted any of your episodes, please get in touch with us, to see if we cant get them back from the backups (yes, we have backups).

By the end of this process, hopefully, we will have a much faster experience on MyTVShows. Depending on how it goes, we may or may not reopen the registrations to new users.

Fingers crossed!

As the website has reached 20,000+ users we have decided to suspend user creation.

As we’re working on the new version of the website we’re also looking into some of the performance issues of the current one, and having lots of new users being created every day wouldn’t really help.

We do apologize for the inconvenience, but we are working hard on it.

We temporarily replaced the registration page with a form so you can take a number (well, not really a number, we just take your address and assign it a number).

As soon as we’re ready to accommodate more accounts, we’ll email those addresses in the order we received them.

Starting today, there’s a new way to link your MyTVShows account with your Twitter account.

We no longer store your username and password, so all you have to do is click a button to link both accounts on your profile.

This is a safer way to do it.

Unfortunatelly, you will need to reactivate your Twitter account once again so that MyTVShows can post updates to your Twitter account. For safety, all the Twitter usernames and passwords were deleted from our database

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