TheTVDB.com

Made slow progress in the last month on the new site, but in the past week I pinned down a few important aspects of the site. I'm far more comfortable with jQuery now and think I have most of the plugins we'll need (jQuery Tools, jeditable, and paginate). The best part of the new site is that it's pretty lightweight for an AJAX site. Here's a breakdown of the series page as it stands right now:

HTML - 40k
CSS - 12kb
jQuery - 60kb
jQuery plugins - 13kb
Custom Javascript - 6kb
Images - unknown, but most likely around 150kb

Note that the series page is by far our biggest page and includes the most artwork. Also note that the HTML will shrink to around 20kb once I move the "extra" artwork out and display it on-demand using AJAX. jQuery is loaded from Google's CDN so that eliminates the load on our server. It's also loaded only once since included js files are cached. The custom Javascript will grow immensely during site development. I'm guessing it'll get up around 75k by the time we're done. All of the CSS is really reusable right now, meaning that it shouldn't grow much more during development. I'd be surprised if we top 20kb.

That means the page itself is around 130kb. That's on the high side until you realize that 90kb of that is only loaded once. That means that after the initial load we only have to worry about the HTML and images.

Coming up next is figuring out how I want to do the artwork, since I'm not happy with the current method. I also need to finish up some handlers for saving records. After those are done I should be able to get through a couple more levels of code pretty quickly.

Here's something to keep you all entertained. Note that the // separators aren't staying and some other stuff on here is changing as well.
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/5151/sneakpeek.jpg

Any updates? Are we getting any closer? A very *rough* estimate will be fine. 2 Months? 6? 1 Year?

I'm not really that hot on the new site itself, but more the new API. Can we devs get a sneak peak? I don't want to write something against the old api now out of uncertainty. This of course only makes sense if we are within a reasonable timeframe of the new site launching.

May I suggest once the overall api design is fixed, to set up a subdomain or something like beta.thetvdb.com. This would work even with only a subset of the old data, and allowing feedback from people.

Use the existing API. I'll give a few months warning for testing the new API. I'll make sure a handful of devs that have long supported the project get an early look at it so we can make sure there are no problems.

Thanks for the (scarily) fast reply

Hello,

Care to share some more updates? Thank you!

Hi

any updates? ETA?

No ETA, but lots of progress made in the last two months. Lots of progress that will be put on hold next week while I'm away on a much needed vacation.

Any developments...?


BTW How was your holidays?



(length)

Yup, progress has been made.

Holidays were great! Thanks for asking.

Hi

any new screenshots?