Frankie Roberto's dashboard

Frankie Roberto marked one of Garrett Dimon's replies in Next Update as useful. Garrett Dimon replied to the idea "Custom issue statuses".

A comment on the idea "Make live tracklistings for the radio stations available!" in BBC:

yay. now i can track down obscure 6music tracks with ease again. – Frankie Roberto, on December 12, 2008 20:36

A comment on the idea "Support OpenID for accounts." in Next Update:

Yay! :-) – Frankie Roberto, on December 12, 2008 20:34

Frankie Roberto marked one of Garrett Dimon's replies in Next Update as useful. Garrett Dimon replied to the idea "Support OpenID for accounts.".

Frankie Roberto shared an idea in Next Update on December 12, 2008 15:02:

Support OpenID for accounts.

It'd be really good if you could support adding OpenID profiles to accounts - save having to remember yet another username/password.

Frankie Roberto replied on December 10, 2008 12:28 to the question "John Barrowman's "exposure"?" in BBC:

I love the fact that people complained about an exposure *on the radio*. As if the sound of someone being naked was offensive...

Frankie Roberto started following the idea "Let me control BBC iPlayer with my Mac remote" in BBC.

Frankie Roberto replied on December 10, 2008 12:22 to the idea "Mac iplayer" in BBC:

The streaming service works for Mac users...

Frankie Roberto shared an idea in BBC on December 10, 2008 11:51:

Make live tracklistings for the radio stations available!

The radio stations (eg BBC 6Music) should all have tracklistings available for each and every show. Preferably which update live and have 'now playing' info.

Currently seems to be unavailable due to a 'technical fault': http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/geo...

I was using last.fm to get this info (see http://www.last.fm/user/bbc6music/tracks) but that seems to have stopped updating sometime yesterday.

Frankie Roberto replied on November 10, 2008 17:27 to the problem "Restore canonical URLs for iPlayer programme pages" in BBC:

Here's what I've just added to my blog post:

As a prime example of why putting titles in URLs is such a bad idea, the URL for the most recent editio of Top Gear is http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fm0xc/Top_Gear_Series_12_Episode_2_(new_series)/. Yup, someone at the BBC decided it’d be a good idea to add ‘(new series)’ to the programme title in the iPlayer database, presumably because old series get repeated so often that it’s hard for users to tell what’s new or not (hint: it should be possible for the website to work this out from the data programmatically, and then display a ‘NEW’ icon). So now the URL (which is meant to be ‘permanent’ & ’stable’) has ‘new’ in it. Which will be accurate for, oh, about 6 months?

Frankie Roberto replied on October 22, 2008 09:36 to the problem "404 Error in welcome email." in Huffduffer:

It's still broken. I just got a welcome e-mail containing the link http://huffduffer.com//frankieroberto - you left an extra slash in there.

...which incidentally returns the homepage as a 200 OK response rather than a 404 page.

A comment on the question "have you considered asking for password confirmation on signup?" in Huffduffer:

Good call. Password confirmation boxes can be just plain annoying, and if you can recover (or reset) passwords via e-mail, then it doesn't really add much security (unless you're stupid enough to mis-type your e-mail address AND password). – Frankie Roberto, on October 22, 2008 09:17

Frankie Roberto replied on October 15, 2008 11:00 to the problem "Restore canonical URLs for iPlayer programme pages" in BBC:

Damn, this annoyed me so much I had to blog it: http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/898

Frankie Roberto reported a problem in BBC on October 15, 2008 10:03:

Restore canonical URLs for iPlayer programme pages

You seem to have appended the URLs, which end in the programme's uniqe PID, with a text string of the programme's name - eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/.... I'm guessing this is for some possibly misguided SEO reason.

The downside of this is that you're not redirecting from the 'old' URLs (ending in just the PID) to the new form, so there's now 2 versions of the URL which both return the same page - not great. Not only can this confuse search engines (though Google is pretty good at figuring out 'similar pages' now), but also means that sites like delicious, digg, etc can end up with two URLs stored in them, with attention divided between them.

What's worse is that you seem to be ignoring the final string altogether, so that it's possibly to invent URLs with meaningless strings, which still return valid pages, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...

My advice would be to either go back to the old style URLs, which were shorter anyway, or to use the new-style URLs consistently, and serve permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.

It's a shame that it's come to this, after you spent so much care in the original crafting of the iPlayer and /programmes URLs!

Frankie Roberto replied on October 05, 2008 22:41 to the idea "I would like iplayer to permanently remember what I watch" in BBC:

Integration with Radio Pop?

Frankie Roberto started following the idea "I would like iplayer to permanently remember what I watch" in BBC.

Frankie Roberto replied on October 05, 2008 22:40 to the idea "Episodes list pages" in BBC:

I've just noticed that some programme pages, like this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00brpck seem to have 'previous / next' links to other episodes in the same series. Does this mean that episode ordering is now (sometimes) available?

And if so, can we add it to the page for the series as a whole?

Frankie Roberto marked one of tristanf's replies in BBC as useful. tristanf replied to the idea "Show 'currently playing' info within the popup player".

Frankie Roberto replied on September 17, 2008 08:08 to the idea "Make the search default to 'BBC News & Sport', NOT 'All of the BBC'." in BBC:

Searching the web should be the default? No way! I'm surprised that you say people expect it to do this, as I get the feeling that most people don't even know that there is a BBC web search function...

Frankie Roberto shared an idea in BBC on September 16, 2008 15:40:

Allow people to use radio pop with other, non-BBC radio stations (and podcasts?)

I know this is already being considered, but thought I'd add that it's a good idea. I don't listen to much commercial radio, but it'd be good to have the option (and would encourage more people to use the service, making it more useful to me).

Might also be worth letting people add podcasts, although this might be stepping into last.fm territory... ?