Lots of ways UK Free TV is little bit better today
All channels page
https://ukfree.tv/channels/all
The ever popular "all channels" page has been tidied up. This was a lot of very old PHP3 code that I refactored to modern standards. The internal changes mean I can sort out several long-standings issues. For clarity the symbols used now have pop-ups to explain their meaning (Sun symbol= daytime). Also each channel type is on a separate paper and most channels now have popups so you can find out more without having to click.
The format is clearer with more space and also extra gaps every five rows. Each of the watch now (or listen now) buttons has been checked to ensure it takes you to the correct live page.
Fixed broken auto links and added new link popups and glossary
The code I wrote for UK free TV automatically adds links to help answer questions you didn't even know you wanted answering. This applies to both above the line and below the line posts.
This has been both fixed and extended. The fix is the code no longer tries to stuff links into existing links! The upgrade is, as shown here: glossary help is now shown with green double underline and pops up on the page when you click/hover; off-site links still show the "favicon" for the site linked to.
In addition, any link to a story or other page here on UK Free TV shows a popup "tooltip" with the summary of what can you find there:
Satellite footprints
https://ukfree.tv/extras/satellite_footprints
In the backend I have also written some new tools to ensure that I get regular notifications of changes to the satellite allocations, so this page is always up to date.
The same tools also check the data for Freeview and Freesat channels being moved, renamed or replaced.
Watch TV live and listen to live radio now on the web
https://ukfree.tv/channels/live
This page has a new larger, responsive format. All of the links have been checked, of course. There are also tooltips for each station.
Other fixes
Stories that are being read are, once again, being promoted to the top of section pages. An error was not reviving the stories and allowing them to fester in the "Other stories" lists.
The "meta description" are no longer excluding "pointless" words, so you can read them.
Several pages were missing titles, these have all been found and fixed.
8:20 PM
Briantist: Experiencing problems (as seen below) when attempting to access the site via Firefox, although it seems to be OK, albeit a little slow to load on IE11, this having only occurred since this morning and shows up exactly the same on both my PC's.
Fatal error: Class 'applicationrouteallcomments.php' not found in /var/www/public_html/framework/routetoRouter.php on line 120
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12:11 AM
Briantist
Problems accessing postings from the email. Happens in IE11, FF and Chrome. Can you have a look please?
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jb38: The first issue is that the ."php" names are no longer in use as everything should have long since migrated to /extras/yourcomments - I can put in a temp redirect but generally the "plain" URLs should be the primary use now.
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jb38: Sorry, the link for the page is https://ukfree.tv/extras/…ents
The speed issues were part of the migration. I move the site, but the database server was still on the old machine.
In addition, for the sake of debugging, I have turned off the Amazon Cloudfront image cache and also the page compression routines.
Cloudfront is back, but it might be a few more days before everything is back to maximum settings.
I've also fixed the bug that was preventing the count of the number of post being returned. This is fixed so you can now get the the "all post by users" page.
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MikeP: The mail is being sent via a service call SendGrid, which seems to be doing strange things to the links.
Going to take a bit more time to fix than I thought...
Brian
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The email issue seems to be a problem with an extra "/" after the hostname, which worked until the messages were "improved" by SendGrid.
I think I've fixed them but it's going to be a short while before I'm sure.
Thanks for helping with this, it is quite an effort keeping track of everything.
Brian
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OK...As everything seems to be OK with the server, I have re-enabled the various forms of compression that make page loading faster.These are:
GZIP on-the-fly encoding (which is ob_start("ob_gzhandler") in PHP).
CSS compression (which makes all CSS into one big long line)JS (Javascript) compress which is Douglas Crockford's JSMin.
HTML minify which removes redudancy from HTML files.
With all this done I have done a check with the Pingdom page testing tool and the main content page - the thing I have control over - loads in 0.3 seconds.
About half of that is DNS/SSL/connect and the other half page compute time and network send.If you want to see what takes time to load, you can see the test for this page here:
Website speed test
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MikeP: I've just clicked on every single link in the email that the system is sending out now. I am pleased to report that they all work and take you to the places you expect. I'm sorry that I can't fix the problem for the messages already sent out, I tried to sort out them with redirects and it kept creating loops so I removed it.
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7:25 PM
Briantist: Many thanks, as all would certainly seem to be perfectly OK now, at least with me anyway!
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