Many of you will know one of the projects I’m involved in with my husband Regan is Throng – a TV watching community site. I’m extremely excited about the latest venture for Throng, an online show called Throng TV.
The first episode is due out soon, but in the meantime check out these two teasers:
One of the most loyal early-adopters on our TV community website Throng is a 14 year old guy called “Tui” from Taranaki. Over the weekend, he discovered the “secret” URL for the new TVNZ digital delivery TV service called ondemand, set to launch later this month. While no media had been granted access to the site, Tui got in and wrote an incredible review of TVNZ’s ondemand and got the scoop on how it all works.
Needless to say, the lack of password or other such protection of the service was fixed this morning and the opportunity for anyone to check out the site was lost. Actually, he just messaged me before to say he’d found parts of it still weren’t protected.
He did a great job, so if you’re interested in finding out more about TVNZ’s ondemand, check out his review and possibly digg it.
Thank you for all the birthday messages aptly organised for me on a secret blog (birthday-wishes.blogspot.com) – I’ve had a wonderful day and looking forward to heading out again tonight.
We got to go to the red carpet of the New Zealand Qantas Television Awards last Saturday night (photos here – one of us at the end), meet lots of celebs and media personalities and help spread the word about our new site Throng. We are featured in this week’s Listener magazine with an article about Regan and I, in addition to being on their “website we love” section (here). Regan’s also doing radio interviews about the site which is great.
Friday night is the U2 concert we’ve been waiting all year for (originally scheduled for March but postponed when The Edge’s daughter fell ill). Can’t wait.
Work-wise, I’m currently working on a number of great projects which you’ll be hearing more about soon and already scheduling in work for 2007.
Top of my list of other things to do: completely redesign my main cre8d site and this blog. My sister’s wedding site will need some more updates now that the details are more finalised.
Oh and next on the list, get back to helping you with your Wordpress questions, Wordpress tutorials and then spending some more time focussing on writing about the wonderful world of Drupal.
We recently launched Throng – for TV fans which is proudly made using Drupal. Here’s some features and information about the modules we used:
Each user gets a blog and categorises their posts in two ways: once using the type of post (rant, rave, gossip, spoilers, news etc) and once with the name of the show(s) they’re writing about.
This way, people can follow their favourite blogs, or just read news/spoilers etc, or just read posts about a specific TV show (e.g. Grey’s Anatomy or The O.C.. There’s also a forum view, if people prefer looking at the content that way.
Because the list of shows is rather long (and growing as people post about other shows), a special page was created with the help of the tagadelic module.
The taxonomy image module has enabled each show has its own picture.
The love/hate module has meant that people can list the shows they love/hate. And when they go to the shows page and they’re logged in, the colors of the show change to pink/blue depending on their preferences.
Thanks to the Amazon Associate Tools and Currency Exchange API, we have our own Shop with pricing in local currency. The exchange rate is daily when cron is run.
The Bookmarksmodule has meant that members can add their favourite blogs to the sidebar of their blog. The module has been adapted so these bookmarks are public.
The Views module has been invaluable.
Other handy little modules include: Smileys, Word filter, URL filter, Private msg, Google Analytics and Forward. A few custom modules have also been written.
We’ve finally opened the doors to Throng – for TV fans from New Zealand. There hasn’t been any other site where kiwis can go and find a community of TV fans to discuss what’s on TV until Throng.
Some features:
We’re really proud of the site and have big ideas and plans for it after almost two years of dreaming about what we’d like the site to achieve.
Go check out Throng.
There’s lots of things we’ll still be working on and features to be added so feedback and suggestions over there most welcome.
If you’re interested in pop culture, are preferably from New Zealand and would like to test out and give feedback on our new site (not yet live as there’s still quite a few things to be done), please email me (rachelcunliffe@gmail.com). We have quite a few people already but a few more would be good.
Thanks!
Elsewhere: 
