Hello FrequencyCast!

A shout out to the folks at FrequencyCast who produce a highly enjoyable podcast about digital TV and other technology.  We know they're at the head of the curve because this week they mentioned Tank Top TV! Seriously, though, you should check it out if you're into your tech and your TV. 

Recommendations for everyone!

We've enabled programme recommendations for all users. 

Based on the programmes you mark as favourites, Tank Top TV can offer recommendations for other shows you might like to watch. 

Sign in, take a look at your Dashboard and let us know what you think of the programmes suggested for you! 

As you browse round the site you'll also see that we now show "more like this" for each programme - the other shows that are also watched by users who like that programme.  For example, Tank Top TV users who like Top Gear also like these shows.

A first take on recommendations

Beta users can now take an early look at online TV show recommendations from Tank Top TV! If you're a beta user, you'll find your recommendations in the dashboard. 

The recommendations will get better as we get more data about what people watch, and what their favourite shows are, but for now we'd love to hear what you think of this first take on programme recommendations.

Get notified about your favourite programmes

We've just moved email notifications out of Beta!  Any user can now get a notification about new episodes of their favourite programmes when they are made available online. 

If you're already a Tank Top TV user, you can turn this feature on in Your Account.  If there are new episodes of any of your favourite programmes, you'll get an email overnight telling you about them (no email means no new episodes). 

An extra Christmas present

Tank Top has been a little neglected recently, you might think.  That's not entirely true - what happened was, I rashly rushed into installing Snow Leopard, and that gave me a whole load of things that aren't compatible with the TurboGears environment we're using.  It has been so frustrating to get it all working again, but some concerted effort this afternoon finally paid off.  

Things we had to mess about with included

• changing the default Python back to 2.5 instead of 2.6 (that was the easy bit!)
• reinstalling TurboGears and some additional modules
  
• rebuilding psycopg2, which required a reinstall of PostgreSQL to get hold of a 32-bit library, using gcc 4.0 instead of 4.2, modifying the psycopg2 build to pick up the right PostgreSQL version, and, for good measure, manually setting the architecture flags
• about 48 different mistakes along the way.
  

It has been a real advert for open source distributions with a single community where you'd go look for answers, instead of finding conflicting advice on different blogs that may or may not be appropriate. 

Anyway, it's finally all sorted out, and I'm considering that a Christmas bonus.  What a way to spend Boxing Day!

Tweets for beta testers

Beta testers - if you had trouble setting up Twitter you'll be glad to know we've resolved a problem there. Do let us know, as always, if it still doesn't work for you.

First updates in response to Beta

Beta testers - thanks for all your comments so far! We've still got a lot to work on, but here are a couple of changes we've made in response to your feedback.

• Don't want to Tweet every time you watch something, but still want to let your friends know what's cool? Now you can Tweet automatically when you mark a programme as a favourite. (You'll need to be signed up to the Tank Top Beta programme to do that.)
  

• A new menu on the programme's page lets you mark all episodes as seen with one click.
  

As ever, let us know if you have any problems or comments.

We've also had some comments that it's confusing that programmes you haven't said you're watching appear in your programme list, and we're dreaming up a way to make this much clearer. Might take a bit of work, but we will get there.

On a separate note, seems like we're getting a lot of site timeouts again - I'm thinking we'll have to try moving the site to a different server. Apologies if you've been affected.