FoF official blog

Temporary hitch

2010-09-28T14:53:00.001-07:00

Sorry guys, the listings will be down for a little while, I'm not feeling well but the problem is fixable. Thanks to those who've got in touch to let me know about the issue. Cheers, George

Update your bookmarks and feeds!

2010-03-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Just a heads up that you may have bookmarked the today's films page, the url for which has changed slightly, so you may need to update your bookmark if you're being shown the home page.

I believe some people are still using the old version of the RSS feed, so if you think you may be, I'd recommend switching as the newer one is much better.

Daily movie emails!

2010-02-20T06:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to user Bren for helping me discover this: you can subscribe to daily film emails from the feed page by clicking the little email symbol in the "Subscribe Now!" box. This service is provided by FeedBurner and it's quite a small icon so I hadn't noticed it before. However, I've tried it, and it works pretty well! You can subscribe directly here - I'll probably put this link up on the front page permanently soon.

Incomplete listings

2010-02-13T15:32:00.001-08:00

Apologies, listings are not currently complete, i.e. many are up but some are missing. This will be corrected asap.

Apologies (again)

2010-02-08T09:08:00.001-08:00

Sorry once more for the missing data. I guess my posts before about the site being way more consistent now were promising more than I could deliver! I'm always surprised how many of you (well, a few!) of you care enough to get in touch and give me a shove when the site's not doing what it should. In this case I haven't been feeling well, but the site should be running on full steam soon.

Good news! I'm caving to the pressures of university and getting myself an aerial and tv license to help relax after (or during!) a hard day of study. That means I'm a lot more likely to pay attention to filmsonfreeview.com, so it might actually be useful to me! It started as a hobby site largely for my own benefit, and eventually became a hobby site for other people's benefit, but now perhaps we can all benefit... ;) George

Couple of tiny changes

2010-01-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

A couple of tiny things have changed today. I updated the front page so that it won't display the same film box twice if it's on twice that day. You can now hover over the picture to see more about it - name, year, when it's on etc. I'm not sure which of the times it will show now for those on twice - but hey that's what makes life interesting, right? Well, no, but it's the excuse I'm sticking with.

Playing catch-up again!

2009-12-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-23T14:07:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-08-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-08-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

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!!

2009-06-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-05-31T08:10:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-05-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-01-14T14:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

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.

Merry Xmas from Films on Freeview!

2008-12-17T07:31:00.001-08:00

It's that special time of year when there are loads of good films on, so don't forget where to come. Tell your family too, make sure they don't miss out on those hidden gems! We wish Happy Christmas and a hungover New Year to all our visitors. Ho ho ho!

Couple of updates...

2008-11-06T14:37:00.000-08:00

So, today there's been an addition to the site: Week at a Glance, which provides a plain text listing so you can have a quick look at all the upcoming films on one page. We know it's all well and good checking out the highest rated movies, but sometimes that trashy action flick you always wanted to see can slip by unnoticed. Well not any more!

A long-awaited update also took place today to try and make the site more cross-browser compatible. It always functioned in Internet Explorer, but the top banner did look a bit odd. Reflections for movie art seem to be working in IE as well. Apologies for the inconvenience, but we're long-term Opera users here at FoF Towers, and browser compatibility is such a sticky (and not very fun!) subject.

Much more to come!

2008-09-14T05:42:00.000-07:00

Progress on the site has been on hold for a few weeks while I settle in to a new job, but I'm hoping to get some spare time soon. First on the list is search engine optimization, because we're only getting about 10 hits a day at the moment, and I think we can do better!

An upcoming feature is RSS feeds - we'll have daily and weekly feeds so the best films will come straight to your reader. The front page will be getting an overhaul to be more useful, and a new logo could be round the corner thanks to an outside contributor. More on that soon I'm sure.

Finally for now, we're aware that the site works well in Firefox and Opera, but doesn't appear correctly in Internet Explorer or the excellent new Google Chrome browser, so we'll be addressing these compatibility issues as soon as we have enough visitors to warrant it! Only joking, it's definitely an important issue for the near future.

Site progressing nicely!

2008-08-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

Box art images are finally working, little bugs have been fixed, and the business cards have been ordered, so it's full steam ahead for FoF. We have lots of fixes and planned features coming up, so watch this space and watch some great films! Tell your friends, link to us on your blog, get the word out and we'll keep getting better. Drop us a line with ideas, comments, anything.

FoF now in testing phase!

2008-07-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

After a good while in offline development, FilmsonFreeview.com is now online to a select bunch of individuals. These include the two people who've heard about it, and Google bots. You are all most welcome!

The site will be undergoing many changes in the coming days to make it much more useable for real people, and to fix some teething troubles. Onwards and upwards!