12th birthday: six improvements to UK Free TV

I have taken the opportunity of the twelfth birthday of UK Free TV to make a few changes.

I must apologise for not having the time to write that many "above the line" articles for UK Free TV in the last few months.

I have been on a full-time personal development training course, and this had left without the time it takes to research and create articles for you here.

Reading ease and grade score

I have added a little feature to the system that shows a simple little graphic to indicate how suitable the language used is for general readership. Using the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests as well as the "Grade" average of the Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning-Fog, Coleman-Liau, SMOG and Automated Readability Indexes.



The general idea is to try and make sure that posts here on UK Free TV are not too technical - or too basic.

The code has been provided by Readability-Score.com - Free Online Readability Calculator - Flesch Kincaid, Gunning Fog and more ....

Faster pages

I have, however, found the time to do quite a lot of bug fixing. Using tools such as New Relic Insights, Google PageSpeed and the Pingdom Website Speed Test I have attempted to make the site as fast to use as possible.

Clearer navigation

I have rearranged the navigation to make it much eaiser to find the maps that UK Free TV can draw of radio stations, TV transmitter coverage areas, radio masts and regional split information.

Improved features

You can now, on the All channels page, click on the Freeview, Sky No Card or Freesat logos to sort and filter the list of channels by that service.

This page now has updated channel icons and new icons to indicate daytime, night-time and local TV channels:



British Isles: Digital TV transmitters: There is now a "master list" of TV transmitters, rather than just the map (see maps section now). This now shows the list of all TV transmitters, ordered by County (or other area), as per this example:



Freeview: Find a Freeview transmitter by frequency now looks much better and has the country and location of each mast.

Extra: reading scores graphs

You might be interested to see these graphs. They show the reading scores for all of the comments posting on UK Free TV.

90-100 easily understood by an average 11-year-old student,
60-70 easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students (good for UK Free TV)
0-30 best understood by university graduates.
(Note that the top graphics on the site have the scale going from 100 down to 0).



Please aim for 7.8 to 9.0 to get a green bar.