404 fiddle

Just a small update to the Google Custom Search code in the 404 error page this morning.

Very close to declare the current v4 codebase officially frozen, as we begin to start v5 coding (more prettiness, more data, more features, more speed).

Feb 18 updates

Replacement of Google AdSense “search the :media-name website” code. It’s now considerably shorter in HTML, and considerably shorter on the page as well. This is all good news.

Changes 16 Feb

(We’ll continue to post software changes here, mainly for our own cataloguing.)

Removal of www.mediauk.com/live – our “live” page for radio and television. It was a moderately poorly-trafficked page, and it was difficult to maintain and make a more useable page.

A slight increase in the get_tweets() function, which paints live tweets on the front page, to enable longer tweets to not be cut off.

Upload of a test page for Google to enable them to check something we plan to do with their custom search box.

We have a new home

After a while keeping this blog up to date, we now have a new home:

www.mediauk.com/blog

There, that was simple, wasn’t it?

This new home will continue to contain updates about our website (though in less excrutiating detail); and also media comment. We hope you’ll follow us over there: we’ve got an RSS feed there and everything.

Pagination, People, and Thanks

Hello from our Seoul, Korea office. (No, really.)

We’ve rewritten our “thanks for posting a job” email, which you get automatically. It’s now more personal, and contains better statistics. As a matter of interest, Media UK gets 188,000 people reading our job pages every month.

Our ‘people’ pages now display correctly for people associated with owners, rather than titles. Here‘s an example. We’ve also made searches for these people work from the Media UK global search.

Articles are now capable of being paginated, and some over-long articles have been paginated as a result.

Apostrophe’s now work properly, and more

Greetings from our Berlin office, where this afternoon, we’ve done the following…

Apostrophes now work correctly in our search system. Until now, the search system didn’t cope very well with that. We’ve also gone through our names listings and sorted out the odd apostrophes for some of the people there, we hope.

We’ve redesigned our Google Insights page (“see number of web searches for…”) to be a little clearer what it’s all about.

We’ve fixed a little bugette around logging radio station “listen” events for stations with multiple streams.

We’re beginning to work on Facebook login integration.

PS: We know that the plural of apostrophe is “apostrophes”, by the way. It’s a punctuation joke for those paying attention.

Red faces

Red faces all round, as our telephone number parser code failed last week, and displayed the wrong telephone numbers for almost every listing in our directory.

We hugely apologise for this (that’s a huge apology) and we’ll put steps in place to ensure that we double-check code like that in our Q&A process.

All a tweet

“Hmm, that tweet seems familiar”, we thought, scanning the twitter updates scrolling around our front page. Turns out that they haven’t been completely updating for a little bit. They are now. You should also see the @mediauk bot following more people.

As a matter of interest, we’ve also tweaked it so that retweets (‘RT’s, for those of you not playing along at home) won’t appear here. So go on, retweet that hate-speech. (Well, no, don’t.)

After our pagination work a few weeks ago for our jobs section, we’ve also added the same pagination code to our Twitter pages, to stop them growing too stupidly unwieldy.

We’ll need 24 hours to completely update all the Twitter information, but most of it’s already updated: and if you’re not, just tweet something – we prioritise regularly-used accounts.

I’m in the phonebooth it’s the one across the hall

We’ve just updated the way we display telephone numbers, so it’s now correct for any UK number we might get thrown.

If you want to use that code for yourself, it’s a little piece of badly-formatted PHP, and it’s here:
http://james.cridland.net/code/format_uk_phonenumbers.html – free for you to use wherever you like.

Pagination… that’s what you need…

As the late, great, Roy Castle once sang: “pagination, that’s what you need – if you want to be a paginator…” Except he clearly didn’t.

We’ve added clear pagination to our jobs index, as it continues to increase in size. We don’t like long, unwieldy pages, and after a bit of research, it’s clear that you don’t, either.

We’ve also made this pagination a little more consistent within the discussion area, where – if you were lucky – you’d have seen page numbers being small at the top of the page and large at the bottom (eurgh). Our discussion area’s pagination contains “next” buttons (because you’re likely to be reading discussions in order), whereas we don’t have that in our jobs section.

We’ve also added a permanent jobs map link to those jobs in the radio and tv section (our press section doesn’t automatically give us the data we need yet). That should make it even easier to find a job near you.

We’ll continue to tweak this over the coming weeks.