Importer now understand foreign languages!

By Lemon - Feb 25, 2024

A short update today :-)

Ive made some improvements to our data importer today. It now understands the native language of TV shows. If a show is aired originally in Belgium or Spain, it will take the Dutch and Spanish episode titles and descriptions.

In total we've added about 50000 additional episode descriptions and updates over 4000 shows with their correct localized episode titles!

Let me know if you see any shows that are still missing some translated episodes titles! Feel free to share them as a comment to this blog post.

Thinking about our show statuses

By Lemon - Feb 16, 2024

I've been thinking about our show statuses. Our UI currently shows these ones: Returning series, New series, Final season, On the bubble, On hiatus, Ended, Pilot rejected, In development, Pilot ordered, Never aired, Unknown. Many of these are badly out of date and I'm working on the importer to revamp all of them in a simplified list of categories.

I want to simplify these a lot! Thinking about our shows, pretty much the majority goes through these six stages:

  • Future Show: It's being developed, nobody knows when it will air exactly. Sometimes we know the year
  • Upcoming Show: The pilot episode release date is known. Its about to be released soon
  • New Show: We are currently in the first season of this show, the season may not have ended yet
  • Returning Show: Season 2 has been announced or we are already further into the show. This is the stable state of a running show.
  • Final Season: We are in the last season, the show is going to end.
  • Ended: The show has ended

These stages make sense for shows like Breaking Bad, Stargate SG-1, etc. Where there is a nice ending to the story.

The example of The Expanse

The Expanse is a weird one, SyFy started the show, and then they cancelled it after 3 seasons. At this point it was considered Ended, but Amazon Prime bought the show and it then turned back into Returning Show/Running Show.

New shows that get cancelled immediately

These are also interesting. They go from New Show directly to Ended. Do they ever go through Final Season? How would you want to see this in the UI?

Would love your feedback!

Can you poke some holes in this? Does this list make sense? I would love your thoughts!

A long overdue update!

By Lemon - Jan 28, 2024

Hey folks! It's been since 6 years since our last blog post, WOW! I owe you all an update!

Personal life

Shortly after that last blog post, in mid-2019, I started a new job in San Francisco. I value their work-life balance a ton, and it has allowed me to slowly work more and more on followmy.tv.

About two years ago, I moved back to Southern California; My job allows me to work remotely, so I moved back to where I love living the most! And about a year ago, I finally was able to buy my own home!

A lot of life-changing events have happened, but followmy.tv remained constant throughout that time! I spend most of my weekends working on the site.

Migration to the cloud

I wanted followmy.tv to be much more stable with the ability to use modern new technologies like Kubernetes. In 2019, I finalized the transition of our entire website from a server in Germany to the Kubernetes platform of Google Cloud. This allowed me to develop very rapidly on the backend services of followmy.tv Deployments became automated and observability became much more straightforward.

This whole project took about 6 months to finish. It tripled our server costs but it was totally worth it for the gained flexibility!

A new data importer

At the very beginning, followmy.tv depended on TVRage. Around 2016, their API broke. As a result, much of our data started to become stale or just incorrect. We switched to a different provider, and our data has improved a lot since then. I never wanted to be dependent on a single API anymore.

The biggest project I've been working on behind the scenes is our new importer. It's built with Python running as a completely independent system that detects and imports all TV Show metadata and stores it in a graph database.

I'm about 80% done with the initial prototype and will soon be integrating this into followmy.tv. It contains a richer dataset of not just TV Shows but also the characters, storylines, and actors of these shows. It's not done yet, but it's close!

I also want to give out a massive shoutout to ForgotMyLines and Fish for being super fantastic content moderators! I can't thank you enough for all those hours of data reviews you've done. Thank you!!

A new internal GraphQL API

The second big project is the new internal GraphQL API that is replacing all the business logic currently written in PHP. As well as all the new features I want to implement in the future. It's written in Typescript and is running in the same Kubernetes cluster as our main application.

This has already been deployed to production and several pages of followmy.tv is already using this new API. Its not a user-visible feature but it allows me to develop new features much faster!

I'm constantly migrating more pages to this new API.

A new search engine

Our search was bad. It struggled with shows that have a very common short name like "Silo". Last month I completely rebuilt this search engine from the ground up. It uses ElasticSearch under the hood. I'm excited to announce that this is now fully available to all users!

My plans for 2024

My main priority is to finish the integration project of the new importer and move all of the existing features to the new API in the next 3 months. Once that is completed I will be shifting focus to revamp our UI. I want the theme of 2024 to be a year full of wonderful new features for you the user!

Some features and ideas I have:

  • Build an initial version of our iOS and Android apps
  • Allow users to create shareable lists like "Top TV shows with strong female lead characters"
  • Add actor information to our show pages
  • Ability to track rewatches, being able to track progress without losing all your history
  • An AI-powered recommendation engine
  • More intelligent notifications when new shows are airing

The community, you!

Followmy.tv is over 10 years old now! I'm eternally grateful for how wonderful this community has been. I checked our database and there are a handful of users who visited followmy.tv literally every day for the last 10 years. That blows my mind!

I promise to you that I will post at least one blog post per month to keep you up to date with the progress I'm making!

Current state of things

By Lemon - Jan 29, 2018

Hi Everyone,

I'm so amazed at this insane loyal userbase. It's so heartwarming to have built something that others continue to enjoy for years and years!

I would like to give everyone an update on the future of followmy.tv. In short, it's not going away, ever. This is my passion product and I will continue to keep it up in the air to the best of my capabilities.

As everyone knows by now, the current UI is very outdated and there haven't been any new features added in over 5 years. With the exception of the contribution system. The reason is that I have been working for the last 5 years on a new version. but due to the sheer size of this website and it's complex social business logic, it's a very big task to do as a single engineer.

To give you some history:

  • The current live production version is running the CakePHP 1.3 framework.
  • CakePHP 2.x was released and Jasper and I started an effort to migrate the website to 2.x.
  • Jasper also started working on a brand new front-end UI which was going to be amazing.
  • Then life happened, I started an immigration process to the United States and both Jasper and I kinda lost interest in TV Shows and generally building apps in our free time.
  • We both were working full time and eventually CakePHP 3.x came around. Again a new version we had to migrate this huge application to. sigh..
  • I finalized my move to the US and Jasper officially left the team. The core team went from 2 to 1.
  • Several years went on where I started focussing on personal health and other life events that were more important.

During all these years when I had some downtime to work on followmy.tv, it was mostly dedicated to maintaining data request, fixing issues. There was no time left in building the new version and the efforts kinda fizzled out. The whole tvrage.com outage was a disaster that almost destroyed followmy.tv.

As for the future, the good news is that I started moving the entire codebase again to a more modern language with a better database engine. I've also started work on a brand new front-end that uses React.JS. I'm also developing the API side-by-side the web app.

In a new effort to get the new version out. I decided to from now on, to no longer add new features to the current live followmy.tv version. I will also be more strict in moderating the new show addition request, only tv shows that are from the major networks will be considered.

I'm doing this so I will have more free time to actually build a better version of the website you all love so much. I want this to be a success, I want to build new cool features for all of you, I want to have the API in place so we can finally move into the mobile app space.

I work full time, so the only thing I ask from this community is to have patience :-). I'm working on a new version. I don't know yet when it will be launched, but when it does, it will be fantastic!

This is the best thing I've built in my life. And I'm especially thankful to all the members that consistently provide feedback, submit show suggestions, and contribute to all the show, episode pages. Followmy.tv wouldn't be what it is today without all of you!

Best, Sarah (Lemon)

Introducing the new contribute system

By Lemon - Sep 06, 2016

Hi Awesome Community,

We are stoked to announce that we've released our first version of the new contribute section. You will now be able to report shows that are missing in our database. This brand new section can be found on followmy.tv/contribute. We are looking forward to adding all those missing TV shows to fuel everyone's couch potato lifestyle! :D

Screenshot of our new contribute tool

This is our first step towards moving followmy.tv to a more community driven database. We believe that having our own data in the future is the way forward to prevent data loss.

Small update: There is a bug with oreign language shows and shows without airdates that prevents them from being imported. We are working on a fix for these. In the meantime, those shows are kept in pending review until the bug is fixed. Our apologies for this inconvenience!

New and improved importer with a major data update

By Lemon - Feb 16, 2016

We are happy to announce that we deployed our latest big update to our importer. We've rewritten the worker from the ground up and made it faster & much smarter. Resulting in more consistent airdates and less duplicate episodes.

During our scheduled maintenance downtime, we've run the full importer up-front. During this initial import, 189.772 episodes for a total of 5.782 tv shows were updated, including fixes to airdates, episode titles or even complete new episodes that where missing.

What is next?

We will continue improving the new importer and monitor its performance very closely during the next days/weeks. Next up, we will start going through the shows that were put in review by our importer. These are shows that have conflicting data and are in need for a manual review.

The importer is not yet fully migrated to the thetvdb.com data service. For example, new TV Shows are still not detected, this is currently a slow manual process. There is a work in progress version of a community driven contribution system which we hope to be releasing before the summer.

Final words

Lastly, I want to thank all you for sticking with us during this major transition phase to another data service! Without our loyal user base, followmy.tv wouldn't be here today.

Small update on current development status

By Lemon - Dec 02, 2015

to @all: I'm still thinking about all of this. I get a flood of 50+ messages each week with comments like "show x is not up to date". If I would fix all of those every day, I would not have time to actually code a fix for the rest.

I started work on the contribution system where our user base can self moderate the data. Including adding new shows / episodes. TheTVDB was a temporary fix for a bigger problem, its not a permanent fix and was never intended to be. It is an intermediate to get at least the most popular shows back up to date with episode numbers and titles.

Currently I'm swamped in a project at work that require me to work late nights for the last couple of weeks. Once we are passed the deadline I will be able to get back on track with fmtv development.

The new data importer has been deployed

By Lemon - Nov 03, 2015

Dear Amazing Loyal Users,

I'm happy to announce that we just deployed an update to the website. We've deployed our new data importer which is using thetvdb.com as a datasource instead of the dead tvrage.com. This is a limited implementation and we did not move the full importer feature set to thetvdb because their API has some limitations.

Going forward, we realized that we no longer want to rely on an external API source for our data. We always thought "We are going to do our own data once our community is big enough", and I believe we are close to that minimum community size.

With that in mind, we are shifting our effort in for the new version towards community tools for open sourcing the entire data set of followmy.tv. In the future we will combine the awesomeness that is our users, and develop our own data without an external API.

As usual, since we just deployed experimental code to production, feel free to email us if you encounter any strange data related bugs.

How does the future for followmy.tv look like?

By Lemon - Sep 07, 2015

FMTV at the moment

Followmy.tv has been around since January 2010, created out of love for Television and desperately in need of a decent agenda to keep track of our favourite episodes. Our main goal was to create a platform to get people to follow, share and talk about their favorite TV Shows. Fast forward 5 years later: we've created a community of 52 342 members, over 6000 of them using followmy.tv on a daily base. We could not have dreamed a greater gift. Thank you!

People who've been around since our start already know we hardly make any statements about followmy.tv. In fact: we only make statements if we feel we need to. This is because our platform is very powerful: It can survive without any moderation. That's all because a lot of people have the same feeling as we do; A lot of people love their TV shows and have a need for a platform to keep track of them, talk about them and to introduce them to friends. This is also the reason why we’re creating this blog; because we still believe in this. Even more: We’re taking the Followmy.tv experience to the next level.

New Updates

The site was originally built on top of the CakePHP 1.3 framework. We started moving to the 2.x version of that framework a couple of years ago. Recently 3.0 came out and we ended up deciding to rebuild the entire site from the ground up. With that in mind, we do have several new features planned and here are a couple of them:

  • OAuth2 API: A fully open API that developers can use to create cool things
  • Native mobile apps: Planning on ios and android
  • Lists: A cool new way to discover tv shows in a unique way
  • Groups: Form groups to discuss and share your favorite tv shows with your closest friends.
  • Discussions: A better way to communicate with fans.

The entire new website will use its own OAuth2 API to communicate with the back-end. Which means that you as a developer will have full creative freedom and making cool things to integrate with followmy.tv!

Our goal is to get all of this done by the end of the year.

Kenny

Since the early beginning we have received tons of mails, tweets, Facebook messages,.. so we decided to introduce Kenny Leys (SilentAlarm) on board of our team to manage our social media platforms. He'll be responsible for keeping our instagram, facebook and twitter up-to-date with the latest news, throwbacks, behind the scene footage and much more. Make sure to follow every single one of them!

Jasper

Jasper and I founded followmy.tv almost 5 years ago. We had this grand idea and we made it reality. Everything you see on your screen was designed by Jasper and he did an amazing job. Due to other work & life responsibilities, Jasper is stepping down from the team. Thanks you for all your hard work Jasper, you will be missed!

UI Designer

At the moment we’re back a 2-man operation but we’re hoping to expand soon! If you are a software developer with plenty experience in CakePHP (or PHP in general) or if you are an awesome UI designer, please drop us an email on info@followmy.tv.

Thanks

We've said it before; Followmy.tv will keep going on as long as we’re existing. All of this thanks to every awesome user out there. We’d like to end this post with a special thanks to all of the users that have donated, without you guys/girls Followmy.tv would not be have been possible to maintain.

Keep track of our social media, we’ll be back soon.

Server crashed but we're back!

By josbeir - Apr 20, 2014

As you may have noticed both our hard drives in our pirmary server broke down (what are the odds?) and we were forced to move the entire project to a new (but better) server.

This meant restoring backups from a point where the drives did not fully corrupt our database. This was somewhere early friday morning. Everything after that is sadly corrupted and not restorable.

One issue that you should check is your settings. Make sure these are still correct (things like dashboard day counts, ..) because that table was damaged the most and a big part had to be restored to default values.

There is one upside, the server is much more powerfull now and should result in a faster and better user experience!

« previous 1 | 2 | 3

Categories

Support us with a donation

Your contribution helps us keep the site running and improving. Thank you! 🙏

All your donations will go go directy to the development of followmy.tv.

You can also do a single donation via PayPal if you prefer that over Patreon 😊