Comments on articles

Another small update today lets directory editors delete (and shortly edit) comments placed on articles. Which is handy.

Gravatar-enabled

A few small changes – you’ll notice that Media UK is now ‘Gravatar-enabled’, adding little pictures of people in the discussion system and in the comments on article pages.

Media UK’s advertising page now contains interesting information (well, perhaps) about our visitors; particularly their income and gender. (More women using us than men?! Goodness.)

More changes on the way, as we work in improving the look and feel of the website (on a sunny day in Hong Kong).

Ach! The snow!

Normally, Media UK gets about 17,000 visitors a day. Over the last few days, however, we’ve seen considerably more – around 47,000; and it’s concentrated at breakfast time (as people find the name of their favourite radio station).

Our site has remained fairly stable during this onslaught; failing only for a few minutes a day. Apologies if it’s running slow, however.

The top searches are all ’snow closures’ or something similar; we’ve added a bunch of search helpers this morning to help people find the snow closure information they’re looking for.

Code update

All well so far with the servers. This is good.

A small code update this morning to fix a small bug which meant that, under certain isolated conditions, we were serving horribly uncompliant JavaScript which broke the ad banners.

The wrong kind of snow for our servers

If last February was anything to go by, we’re expecting this morning to be a difficult one for Media UK: you can see the effect that the snow had last time it came around (more than trebling the site visits), and it also killed the site off for part of the day.

We’re hoping that efficiencies we’ve made in the code and the server infrastructure will have fixed some of those issues this time around, so let’s see – but apologies if Media UK is sluggish between 8.00am and 11.00am.

Twitter lists

A little recreational coding has given everyone four lots of nice Twitter lists of media titles.

See them at http://twitter.com/mediauk/lists

This also marks the (low-key) launch of Media UK’s twitter list for television channels. We’ll not make a song and dance about it, because there aren’t that many, but it’s nice to be able to complete the set.

Also in this release: some tweaks to the description fields in some of the launch pages, to make it look rather less like it’s duplication to Mr Google. We like Mr Google, he pays our bills.

As a matter of interest, the Twitter lists are not instantly updated on change; we need to manually rebuild them. We’ve written the script, so it’s something we’ll try to remember to do every month or so.

New RAJAR Q3 2009

Lucky you – we’ve just loaded the full RAJAR figures for Q3 2009. (RAJAR figures are the radio figures in the UK, if you’re new to the party).

Find them by going to a radio station page, and hitting the ‘latest audience figures’ link. Here’s BBC Radio 4’s highest-ever audience figures, for example.

Search tweaks

Some enhancements to search this afternoon, particularly those people who insist on searching Media UK for:

deaths

No, really – there are quite a lot of them.

We’ve also added a useful hint for, cough, one-handed surfers looking for “xxx”; and it might be interesting to know that one of the way Media UK is targeted for spammers is by a bot that repeatedly searches for

<p>free gay men webcams</p><p>webcam…

… no, really. Anyway, that robot now gets a special message.

More links, more articles, and better FAQs

https:// links, like those used on the BBC jobs website, are now clickable in the jobs pages; we use this to achieve this:

$job_contact = eregi_replace(“((http|https)://[^ ]*)”,”<a href=\”\\1\”>\\1</a>”,$job_contact);

Tweets in the scrolling updates on the right-hand side column, and in people pages, now have nice links to other people; hashtags; and all the other proper links that they have on the main Twitter site, thanks to this little function.

We’ve added another nice testimonial to our jobs testimonial script (on the right-hand side in most jobs pages):

We posted our ad for a TV presenter on Thursday afternoon and by Tuesday morning we’d had over 40 high quality applications for the job.  We’re recording our chosen presenter this morning.  Thanks very much Media UK – you made life much, much easier!

(yay!)

We’ve also added a bunch of FAQ articles on our contact page as well, using our articles system. You might have also spotted a few new articles appearing on the website elsewhere.

301 or 302 – we plump for 301

When you click on a news story, it goes via our site to count the amount of interest for each news story. This helps us produce the ‘most popular story’ links on the right-hand side of the news pages, as well as the news headlines in our daily emails.

Anyway, until today, these were 302 ‘temporary redirects’, rather than 301 ‘permanent redirects’. If we’re reading this right, 302 links don’t give Media UK the ‘credit’ for linking to these news sources; while 301 links do. (Similarly, 302 links don’t give news sites the credit for being linked-to by Media UK; 301 links do).

So, as a result, you’ll find all our news stories now are ‘301′ and not ‘302′ redirects. It should result in Media UK getting slightly better SEO (and, indeed, our news providers). 301’s should also be cached upstream (which, given that every news story will be cached a similar amount, shouldn’t harm the rankings).

Incidentally, links to media websites from directory entries don’t do this (and haven’t for a while). While we used to send these, too, through a link-counter, we dropped that practice; we’re still counting where people go, but through Google Analytics’ JavaScript calls, rather than a link-counter script. This is why the ‘most popular’ menu item on the front page disappeared a while back. It’s good news for the internet, and good news for you.

In other news, we’ve also tweaked our news routines so you should see even faster news updates from news providers.