TV Whirl - A bumper week of updates over the site

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. For those who've been around here a long time, you might remember TV Whirl. It launched on the net back in 2001, back when RealVideo 8 was still the bright future and Youtube was not even a glint in the Google Milkman's eye, and all these years later... it's still here for some reason! The site has been a bit quiet in recent times, but what with my sabbatical around the globe not finding any plucky design companies to sponsor me, it's finally been receiving some much needed attention of late as it now enters it's 15th year online! Very recently the site template was updated to make it properly responsive and mobile friendly bringing the site into something like 2010! Then over the course of the last month I've been rebuilding the whole site using a somewhat more modern underlying base to assist with it's future. We're now sat on a proper CMS, meaning I can actually add content pretty quickly going forward as opposed to copying and pasting HTML. This change around has also given a chance to rewrite a lot of the existing content so it reads less like it was written by a 15 year old (you know, maybe that's why I didn't get that sponsorship), correct some factual inaccuracies/dates, and add clips onto actual pages so they aren't just strewn randomly around the site.

It's also given a chance to start getting some of the video I've had sitting gathering dust on the harddrive online at long last. At the moment there's been a load of CITV stuff added in both from the 2013 30th Birthday weekend and more historically from the Christmas 2001 package. The first of much new stuff to come over the next few months hopefully.

http://www.tvwhirl.co.uk

(And on a final note, if at first look you all think 'Hey, wait a minute! This design doesn't look much different', I assure you that is not because I can't design to save my life. But it's actually because I am taking my learnings from the books of BBC Two design. So I've just 'refreshed' my klassic look to save on those precious pennies! Yeah, fight the recession and all that!)

You say you're rewriting some things, well, I found a few minor issues you might want to deal with:

http://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/programmes/soaps-imported/
You should probably update the year there - if any characters from Home and Away c1992 are still there now at all.



http://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/programmes/childrens/
That Bobobobs clip is probably not that massive by today's standards - I'd edit that.
This, in reference to SMTV Gold, is also out of date. 13 years ago is definitely not recent.
That link's going to need fixing or removing.

This reference is also outdated, as Brookside was axed in 2003:



http://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/programmes/soaps-british/

Sorry to be a bit pedantic - great to see TV Whirl back

Actually be as pedantic as it needs, as more eyes just gets content issues spotted and fixed quicker! I'm still working through pages one by one, but particularly on the clip descriptions with over 1400 of them it's going to take a while to catch everything. I suspect that even with the amount of time spent so far, it's probably only caught about 10% of the things that could do with being changed. I updated all the references you've both mentioned above this afternoon so thanks for those (apparently in the case of the Home and Away description, the 2005 ref is meant to be to the latest H&A one on the site rather than present day - but even then I've tweaked that one a little).

The actual longer term goal with this is to make it much easier to help flag any inaccuracies, and keep all the information on there as sharp and useful, as pictures and video is useless without solid and uptodate facts to back it all up. I'm hoping to even add the ability to recommend edits directly through the site eventually almost in a wiki-form. However one of the big mistakes I've made with the site over the past few years has been to come up with way too many of the ideas first, try and implement them all at once, and fail miserably to get it finished as a result. So the goal this time round has been to start from the minimum, get the basic site system running in a way that's similar to the old one but added a bit more, then continue to add on the more useful features later. Somewhere an Agile-Scrum-Master-bluesky-thinking-manager-type would probably be getting a little too excited at a picture of a circle right about now!

I like your style

A couple more:

http://tvwhirl.co.uk/presentation/bbc/bbc-one/bbc-one-2002-2006/



I assume this refers to it's rare usage; of course, all those idents have now been retired! Also, in the 2008 section on this page:

http://tvwhirl.co.uk/presentation/bbc/bbc-one/bbc-one-christmas/







Hope these help

Another one for you



Sounds better than "some docklands"!

^If that's referring to the dancer idents, what's the problem?

Yeah, I presume it was referring to one of the sub titles for the dancers page which still had '2002 - present' in it, but corrected that now and caught up with a few of the other bits and pieces mentioned above. I've been working through other pages mostly in the pres area all this week and hope to get a full sweep completed over the weekend.

If there is an actual good interest in offering up improvements to the details and text on pages, I can try and get the ability to suggest edits directly though the site in place a bit quicker. If anyone does want to beta test that feature a bit earlier as it'll probably need a bit of tweaking to actually get right before being publically available, drop me a PM!

good to see you back

Like nbafan, it is good to see you back. 1 minor issue I noticed is located on the Channel 4 page from 2015 to now, where the last credits is just the last menu which was already above, despite it having the thumbnail and title card being about the credits.

https://www.tvwhirl.co.uk/presentation/channel-4/channel-4-channel/channel-4-2015-onwards/