Showdates.me

Spice Up Your Boring Calendars With Something To Actually Look Forward To

So, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: update the Showdates blog. There is new stuff and it’s time to celebrate!

First, I really want to thank all of our members for using the site. Seeing the number of people grow and enjoy what we’ve built over the year is fascinating. Your feedback is friendly and helpful, but to see so much faces around popular shows is just awesome.

Quick stats: there are currently 300 registered users. 66 of them visited the last 7 days. One year ago we had 35 members. Compared to the same week one year ago, our number of visitors increased with 323,56%. Also interesting: compared to last year, usage of Safari has decreased with -46,53%. The number of Opera users increased with whopping 2166,52%. Still, that are just 96 people over the last month.

Anyway. Let us head over to the new stuff. Your couch is still the place to go to quickly see what episode you ought to see next. I still think this is one of the best features of Showdates. However, wouldn’t it be great to have a calendar like view of your events? I thought so too. Starting today, you can add Showdates to your favorite calendar application. So, go ahead and light up your calendar with appointments to look forward to (instead of that appointment with your dentist…). You will find a button to the new feature on your couch.

Small updates and mobile search

Hey guys! I’ve just pushed an update, which contains the following changes:

- The large user avatar has been replaced with a smaller and nicer element. It functions as a dropdown to the currently available pages you need next to your couch.

- As requested: sharing a page on Facebook will now display the description of the show instead of a Showdates branded text. I like it.

- The follow/unfollow buttons don’t refresh the page anymore. Follow away without load times :)
- Biggest new feature: because the search field does not fit inside the header while browsing Showdates on smaller screens, I just left it out. Up until now, no search option was available on for example your iPhone. Not anymore, because right now you’ll see a search icon right next to your avatar. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but wanted to get this out of the door, so let me know what you think!

Looks good, huh? Btw, you should follow Suits. It’s a great series and it is airing again in a couple of days (so you have some time to catch up or re-watch the last episode).

As always: let me know if there is anything off. Also, if you have ideas or suggestions on how to improve stuff, get in touch! You can reach me via Twitter (@shwdts) or the feedback form on the website.

What we’re working on and where we’re heading to

It has been a little while since our last update. Life is a blast with lots going on outside Showdates. Anyway, we wanted to share what has been going on and tell you a little about stuff we are thinking of.

First off, last week one of our kind users marked the 100,000th episode as watched. It is so great to see a little tool created because of something we could not find on the internet being used by a growing bunch of people. Thanks to you too for reading and using Showdates! As always: don’t hesitate to tell your friends what you like and to tell us what you really think of our little project.

Currently, We’re reworking a bit of the navigation. The mobile version lacks the search option, which really sucks. To create more space for future additions, a very neat dropdown menu will be added. The result will look something like Pinterest is doing, if you visit their website with your device. Of course we are aiming to make it look and work better than their approach.

After that, there is an endless list of things we want to improve or add. A couple of things:

1. We like to start gathering e-mailaddresses. Up until now, we did not ask you for your precious address because there was no need. We think we can really help you keep track of your shows and discover more stuff you like by sending occasional e-mails. We will ask you nicely before sending anything, pinkie swear.

2. Better guidance for new users. As we start adding more features, we need a simple guide that helps you build your initial couch and tells you where to find certain things. We want our new member to feel at home right away.

3. Recommendations. This is a biggie. Based on the shows you are following we think we can make some really nice recommendations on shows to start watching. Those recommendations will get even better when more users find their way to Showdates!

What do you think of these features? Anything (big or small) to add?

Last thing: we’re scheduling a couple of Skype sessions to get to know our users and hear your opinion about Showdates. Let us know if you’re interested to participate, it would absolutely rock to hear from you!

Updated couch to display correct date information

Since we’ve launched Showdates, more and more people are finding the website. Watching shows is something that’s done all around the world, so when we built Showdates we did this with an international group of users in mind. Our statistics show people from at least 39 countries visiting Showdates. Pretty cool!

We added the option to select your timezone a couple of weeks after the launch of Showdates, but it was not perfect because it did not take daylight saving time into account. As of now, this should be fixed. We have rewritten the way our timezone information is stored and cleaned up related code. If you still find the dates or times to be wrong, let us know!

For updates and other interesting things around your favorite shows, you should follow us on Twitter.

We have a brand new homepage

Ever since we launched Showdates, the homepage has been something that needed more love and attention. New members should feel welcome right away, and a good homepage helps telling visitors more about the application to convince them to join!

The new homepage does just that. We’ve updated the headlines but more importantly, we added images that highlight how Showdates works. Plus: you can log in and sign up from the main page too!

Improving the shows page

The new shows page has been received very well, it’s a huge improvement over the old search page. We set to create a part of the website where it is easy and fun to browse shows to find new series you might want to check out. As always there are ways to improve. In this post I’d like to highlight two updates we pushed today.

1. Better accessibility for our mobile users
We get more and more questions for a Showdates App, which is obviously not there yet. There are some plans, but nothing is set in stone and we really want to focus on the website the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, you might want to check out our website on your phone, because it is fully accessible already. It works exactly the same as the website and we think it looks great too. Today we have added the genre selector, so you are able to browse the available genres from your phone.

2. Expanded the number of genres available on the site
If you are a frequent user you probably found our secret route: clicking on the genres displayed at each show will open the shows page for the selected genre. We have added a nice dropdown to make our genre-collection complete.

We really hope you enjoy our little tweaks! Please share your thoughts via the feedback form on the website, Twitter or Facebook!

On creating a better search

Well, we have written about it in the past via Facebook: improving the way you search through shows is something that NEEDS to be really good and really fast. Working on improving the search engine is teaching us a lot about speed improvements and it has been fun.

You use the search box to find shows you know and you want to follow. Maybe a friend told you about it, now you want to look it up to add it to your couch. Another way of using the search box is to quickly jump to a show you already follow. Today we have made two changes that will speed up searching.

1. We are not searching inside the shows’ name anymore. So “girl” will not return “new girl” anymore. This speeds up searching a lot at our end. There is one downside, you have to remember if a show starts with “The” in for example “The Big Bang Theory”. This will be solved!

2. Search happens in two steps: the shows you follow are preloaded. This means that you will see hits within the shows you follow almost instantly, and quickly after that you will see shows you do not already follow. If you are using the search to jump to shows you will love this.

We love to hear your experience with our new and improved search!

Welcome to the Showdates blog!

From this place, we will share bits of stuff we are working on while working on Showdates. We really want to involve our users in the process of adding and expanding features and we hope our blog will help to communicate this in a better way.

Also, we want to say a big thank you to our current users! You have been absolutely great. Until today, you have checked off 39.931 episodes. We are currently covering 30.392 shows with 916.494 episodes. A lot of stuff to be watched yet!

Showdates allows you to follow shows and mark episodes you’ve seen as watched. The couch is your personal “TV Todo list”, with the next episode for every show you follow lined up. We don’t like signing up, so made it really easy for you to sign up using Facebook or Twitter. We have also integrated Facebook timeline to quickly show your friend that great new series you’re following. Our latest feature is our completely revamped shows page. It is a great place to discover new shows by genre.

We hope you like the project as much as we do and love to hear from you if you have any thoughts or suggestions!