Status updates, held off-site, about Media UK services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We announced the other week that we’re retiring The Knowledge from our website – and, indeed, we’ve already managed to do quite a lot of the work to do this.
You’ll spot that our most popular articles, like our introduction to UK newspapers, have shifted back from The Knowledge into our article system – and you’ll also spot a swanky new ‘comment’ feature at the bottom. It’s not quite finished yet, but you can now add your thoughts into these articles as we go along (and we’ll also make sure that we update the articles as a result of your comments if they’re any good).
If you’re missing The Knowledge, it’s still there; but the articles will begin to be almost impossible to find in a day or so.
We’ve also been battling today with a dodgy internet connection, and a printer that sounds like a seal. Honestly. Someone has been trying to print CDs in this office, and it spent about twenty minutes making a bloody irritating noise before it ejected a pristine, completely blank, CD. Rubbish.
Those nice people at Rackspace tell me that Media UK will be down for a short period on October 2, at 1.00am, for essential maintenance.
In this day and age, I suspect the only people up at that time will be Google and possibly the odd automated overnight service, but probably useful for you to know.
Hello there,
To let you know that we’ll be closing The Knowledge in the next couple of weeks. Its wiki format is difficult to fit into the website, and it doesn’t work well with the rest of the site.
I’m glad to let you know, however, that the information will still stay on Media UK, in more structured and editorially-sound articles. We’re also adding the ability to comment on the pages, too, to allow them to be continually updated by a wider range of people; no ‘real-names’ accounts will be required.
The apparent silence in terms of development in the past week has been mainly due to other work commitments.
Just like WordPress, Media UK now lists shortlinks as rel=shortlink links; both in the header and (for those that support it) in the HTTP headers as well. We’re doing this for directory entries, but will be doing the same for news entries too, once we re-write that system. (Currently, news items are assigned a shortlink when they’re sent out via Twitter, rather than at the time of ingest.)
Monitoring the 404 errors has been interesting.
Firstly, we’ve noticed a bug in the Google Insights for Search gadget that we use. We’ve reported that. We’ve also deliberately made the title of this posting antagonistic, to make the Google people come here and look. It might work.
Secondly, it seems that some people were visiting www.mediauk.com/radio/jobs and not www.mediauk.com/radio/jobs/ – the trailing slash at the end made a difference to how some of the links worked inside the page, and counts, of course, as two separate pages for Google. As a result, there’s now some simple code checking to force people to the correct /radio/jobs/ page URL. We’ve also been subtly tweaking other pages as a result of this.
And thank you to the person who visited www.mediauk.com/hijamesi’mtestingthenew404 – yes, we spotted that too.
In other news, Media UK was down for a few minutes at 1.00am this morning, for a software upgrade for added resilience. So far, we’ve seen no more issues with connection to the database server, so it could be that we’ve fixed that little issue. There again…
Finally, Yahoo! users are, we notice, sometimes not getting our emails. You can blame brain-dead users on Yahoo! clicking ‘report spam’ instead of following our unsubscribe links for that. Still, we do send 750,000 emails every month. Anyway, we’re on the case with Yahoo.
New content:
Under the hood:
Directory editors:
