…And we’re back
We’ve found a temporary workaround to allow us to still crawl Hulu while we work out a more long term stragedy.
We can play cat and mouse all day, but in the end we both have the same goal and we hope to eventually strike an agreement with hulu to allow us to officially crawl their site.
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Hulu blocks The Show Stop
It appears Hulu’s attack on anyone who is trying to progress legal content over the Internet has continued to include the Show Stop.
Today Hulu began blocking our show crawler. In a way it’s sort of validating for us that they feel we are worth the effort to block the Show Stop. While Hulu is not our only content provider, we have temporarily taken down the Show Stop while we regroup.
We should be back up in a few hours. Stay tuned….
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Did you miss us?
It’s been a little while since we’ve updated you on the Show Stop goings on. We’re sorry, we havn’t forgotten about you.
We’ve gotten to a point where we feel comfortable stepping back from aggresive development to take a look at the business side of things, and figure out where we would like to take The Show Stop in the long run.
While we do some serious thinking, and make some big decisions, we’ve finally set our episode scraper to crawl our supported networks automatically several times a day. This might seem like an obvious thing to do, and you may wonder while we’ve take so long to do this. Well, the short answer is we didn’t really need to have it running automatically. We were continually working on it, and an automatic script would just cause problems when we were trying to add a new network or correct a bug. Now that we’re not consitantly modifying it, its safe to have the scraper run automatically, and we can have up to date data in our database. yay!
We’re considering what networks to add next, and how we can improve the user experience, so let us know what you think by commenting or sending some emails to feedback@theshowstop.com.
Stay tuned…
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Slow Day at The Show Stop
Now much to report today.
After giving the database a good workout recently, we’ve been taking a hard look at it and making a few additions to assist us in making sure our info is accurate and complete.
We’ve also updated the parser to handle some inconsistencies as well as fixed a few legitimate bugs.
Not too glamorous, but it’s still progress.
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Tags: parser database
The CW, and more MTV bug fixes.
Today I am proud to announce you can find the latest episodes of Gossip Girl and 90210 on The Show Stop. That’s right, we’ve added The CW!
In addition to now offering shows from the CW, we have fixed a few bugs with the MTV parser which is working much more effectively, but MTV’s inconsistent site format is continuing to be a challenge for us.
I believe we will have reached a point where we can focus on tightening some of the screws and doing some serious QA in order to ensure we have a stable product before we move into the early phases of public testing. We will be continuing to add networks but at a slower pace than we have been.
We are really excited about the show stop and can’t wait to get it out so you all can use it and help us make it better.
Stay tuned…
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Tags: cw parser mtv
First off I’d like to welcome Miguel to the Show Stop. Now that we’ve got a well rounded team we should be able to further increase our momentum on the way to being your number one source for tv shows on the web.
After meeting with the whole team, we have some clearer goals and reprioritizing a little. Today we made some modifications to our database structure to be less confusing and more flexible to future content.
Also, we made some key improvements to the parsing and updating algorithm that elliminates the need to take the site down to update the database. I fixed a few important bugs with the parser and made it much faster and more reliable in general.
Another update to the parser grabs individual episode thumbnail images for integration into thre site if necessary.
Finally we rounded off the day examining the cw for possible parsing very soon.
As always, stay tuned…
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Tags: migs parser database images
ABC, another one bites the dust
I spent most of this afternoon working on the show stop ABC support, and I am proud to announce that you can now find the latest episode of Scrubs on TheShowStop.com!
Every network has it’s own implementation each with it’s own new challenges. I was glad that ABC was pretty consistent with their show naming and page implementation. However, since all the info we needed was buried in javascript I had to write a little more custom code thsn I did for other networks.
So what’s next? It’s not obvious what network will be next on the block. Candidates include the cw, vh1, USA, tvland, and perhaps others not mentioned. I’ll also be looking to make some back end improvements and setup automatic parsing to keep all our shows up to date.
Stay tuned…
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Tags: abc, parsing, show, tv
A little closer
Tonight we made some design improvements that really make the site look legit, no more default list element or header styles for the episode listing and search result pages. We still need to finalize our design to make it prettier and more user friendly but it’s still a huge improvement.
Additionally, we added a breadcrumb list at the top so you can easily tell where you are and get back to any previous page in your direct history. I don’t know why but I particularly like this little feature.
I am almost comfortable enough to show this baby off a little but we need to do some QA and clean up our about section. Stay tuned…
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We’re back from break and resumed work on the show stop.
Late last week we fixed a number of bugs involving a number of MTV shows. MTV has posed our first real challenge as we havn’t been able to find a backend feed with all the information in a easy machine readable format. Additionally, even the information provided to the users on the page is inconsistent in many unpredictable ways. We’ve done our best to grab all the shows we can with as much info as possible without writing special cases for every show. Eventually we will have EVERY show, but for now we are focusing on getting as many shows as possible then we will go back and tighten the screws so there are no leaks.
You may have noticed a slight color change in our logo on theshowstop.com. We made this change in parallel with the design we have desided to go with on the site. We are currently working on getting the new, clean design up on all pages then we will be near ready for some beta testing.
Stay tuned folks!
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The progress continues…
I didn’t think it was possible, but today was even more productive than yesterday on The Show Stop front.
Thanks to a short day at our day job, we were able to crank out the CBS show parser this afternoon, adding additional shows and episodes to our search database.
Inspired, I went home and coded the MTV parser, so now you can get your “Cribs” fix by way of The Show Stop!
I’ll be on hiatus until after christmas but when I get back I’m looking at you ABC!
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