MyTVShows Blog

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.

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

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”.

Today we added a Calendar feed for every show in the database. This allows you to subscribe to each show calendar on Google Calendar or Apple iCal

This is how it will look on your calendar:

Enjoy

This weekend we added a few more features to MyTVShows.

First of all, we changed the menus. The previous version was getting short on space and we needed to add a few more items so now we have a main menu and each item has its own submenus. We think this will make it easier to navigate through out the website and allows us to add some more items as we develop more new features.

Widgets

The widgets are now available to all users. We added the possibility to select how many episodes you want to show and the code updates automatically:

Widgets

Twitter integration

You can now let MyTVShows post updates to your Twitter account whenever you mark an episode as seen. Just fill in your twitter accout details (unfortunatelly Twitter requires us to ask for your password, but we promise we won’t use it for anything else than this).

Twitter account details

And it will look something like this on your Twitter account:

Hope you like it!

We are testing a widget that you can add to your site/blog to show other people wich episodes you have recently watched.

To add this widget to your site/blog, just copy and paste the following code into the HTML of your pages:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.mytvshows.org/widgets/recent.php?u=XXXXXX&limit=5"></script>

Just replace the XXXXXX with your MyTVShows username and there you go. If you like, you can also select how many episodes you want to show, just by changing the limit variable.

This is what it will look like:

Update: This feature is no longer Beta, and you can find it on your profile page on MyTVShows.

Welcome to the MyTVShows blog!

This is where we’ll keep you updated about the development of MyTVShows. Here, we will write about the new features we’ll add and also about some bug fixes and small improvements/enhancements.

Stay tunned, and keep track of the website that keeps track of your episodes!