Anonymous users, new programmes this week

New features deployed today!

• Anonymous users can now browse the listings. If you aren't signed in and you try to block or favourite something, you'll be taken back to the login page.
• For both signed in and anonymous users there's a list of new programmes from the last 7 days. This list won't be fully populated until it has been running for a week!
  

On the less positive front we are running out of memory at our hosting service, so if anyone has any bright ideas on how to reduce memory consumption in Turbogears, we're all ears...

Performance improvements

Oops, I found a silly mistake in the code when you click on the 'block' cross or 'favourite' heart on the main programme list page. The good news is that it was easy to correct and now marking programs as favourites or blocking them is much much faster.

ITV now listed! And you can mark your favourites

Phil's done magic things to get ITV Player shows included in our listings!

And my contribution to this release is a new Favourites list - you can mark shows as your favourites to add them to this list.

So that's two big new features we can tick off our to-do list...but somehow we've got even more we want to work on: getting the category information for ITV shows for one thing. And with all their shows as well as what's on BBC iPlayer, the programme list is very long now, so we're going to work on some ways to help you easily get it down to a manageable size of shows you really want to watch.

Let us know what you think!

Making the most of Tank Top TV

The idea of Tank Top TV is to give you a manageably short list of programmes that you might want to watch online. When you first create an account, you'll find a long list of everything we currently know about that's available. To get the most out of the service, you'll want to block the things you never want to watch so that it's easier to find what you do like. Here are our hints and tips...

• If you never watch programmes from a particular channel, block the whole channel. For example, Personally I don't get great performance from iPlayer HD, so I've blocked the BBC HD channel from my list.
  
  
• You can block whole categories of programmes to remove things you never watch. Programmes are often assigned to multiple categories - we get this information straight from the broadcaster. A programme won't be listed on Tank Top if you've blocked any of its categories. So if you love cricket but you hate snooker, you'll want to block the Snooker category but not Sport.
  
  
• Clicking on a category name in the category list shows you all its programmes, so that's an easy way to see what you're going to drop if you block that category.
  
  
• Once you've filtered on channels and categories, block everything else from your programme list that you don't want cluttering up your screen next time you log in. If you don't think you'll watch it, you might was well block it. You can always check what you've blocked and unblock it if you change your mind!
  

Spend a few minutes filtering your list to start with, and you'll appreciate it when you next sign in and have sensible list of programmes to consider for your viewing pleasure!

What is Tank Top TV?

Tank Top shows you a list of all the online TV shows that are currently available. You can filter out the programmes, channels and categories that you're not interested in, so you have a personalised list of what you might like to watch.

Here's an example programme list:



It's a lot quicker to find a programme to watch from this list than to navigate around BBC iPlayer searching for the things you might like. It's continually refreshed with the content that's available, so it's always up-to-date.

Right now we only cover BBC iPlayer, but we're working on adding listings for other sources too. The idea is to consolidate information about everything you might like to watch, all in one place.

Channel filtering

You can now filter by channel as well as category. So if you never watch anything on BBC Four, or if you don't have the bandwidth for BBC HD, you can just remove those programmes from your list with a click of the mouse.

Blocking categories and programmes

Phil added a link so you can block the category or programme you're looking at from within its own page rather than having to do it from the category / programme list. This does make Tank Top quite a bit easier to use.

And I've been writing a little bit of code (for the first time in years!) to add the ability to blocking and list by channel. We're being a bit cautious about deploying this feature as it's going to require a database change, and we don't want to break the live database - hopefully we will get the chance to test and roll out that update over the next few days.