tiffr
Progress updates and general musings on the development and maintenance of tiffr.com, the easy way to select your films for the Toronto International Film Festival.
http://tiffr.com
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Yesterday we updated TIFFr for TIFF11 (after many hours of data wrangling and server configuration). We hope that it serves you all well this year.
We had many ambitious plans to upgrade TIFFr in many new and wonderful ways but life (and some laziness) got in the way and we only managed to upgrade our servers and overhaul the way we ingest the data. We’ll be working to eek out some small updates over the next few days to improve the experience while we’re in this mindset.
If you have feature requests, bug reports or anything else you want to tell us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know. TIFFr only gets better when we work together.
Have a great festival!
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(with two D’s for a double dose of TIFF scheduling awesomeness)
We’ve just pushed up a major release of tiffr.com, with many new features and bug fixes for all.
PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS
You can now schedule Press & Industry screenings for TIFF10. This means that all of our friends who are attending TIFF on an industry badge (or their assistants) no longer have to slave away on putting together a usable schedule like the plebes who haven’t heard about tiffr yet.
PUBLIC SHORTLISTS
Shortlists are now public and sharable (pictured above). You can check out mine here and Ryan’s here.
FILTERS
When working with the scheduler you can now easily filter the results. Show or hide Press & Industry screenings, Premium screenings, Before 5pm, After 5pm or any combination of these filters. On top of that you can look at only first screenings or collapse the whole schedule down to just the ones you’ve selected so far.
GO FORTH
We’re pretty excited about the new features and we hope they’re helpful. It’s been hard to find the time make this happen, all the while wrangling with unwieldy data and dealing with uncooperative servers, but we bet it’ll save us all time in the long run and that’s the whole point.
See you at the festival!
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Ryan and I were interviewed recently for a piece about TIFFr on torontoist.com. Hopefully the exposure will save a lot more TIFF-goers some time this year.
Stay tuned for more updates!
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After a long and gruelling couple of days of disappointment and false starts with the TIFF website and schedule, I’m happy to announce that tiffr.com up and running and ready to save you time when making your schedule for TIFF10.
We had to revert to our old codebase, unfortunately, so there are no new features or bug fixes in the currently running version, but we’re working hard in the background to get our new and improved code up for the festival this year.
There’s still a lot of great updates coming and we’ll try to keep you posted as much as possible.
Thanks for your patience and let the scheduling begin!
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To avoid duplication and not step on toes, tiffr.com was built to rely on the TIFF website for the canonical information about the festival (after all they organize and run the festival, who should know the information about the films and screenings better than them?). Our aim was to build on the fact that their website, historically, isn’t the greatest, to put it delicately. There are some major risks to that approach when it comes to TIFF, namely that their site won’t work reliably or at all, and that has come to haunt us this year (so far).
Because of broken links and unreliable data that has changed several times since the schedule was “released” yesterday, on top of the fact that Ryan and I are completely swamped with our day jobs, we haven’t been able to properly launch tiffr.com yet for TIFF10.
Have no fear, though. We’re doing our best to come up with a way so that you don’t have to go back to flash cards, backs of envelopes and Ouija boards to figure out your schedule for this year’s festival.
We’ll let you know when the site is ready for use, and in the meantime, sit back, relax, flip casually through your festival package and rest assured that tiffr will save you time again this year.
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Last night after I saw Lars von Trier’s Antichrist I was too afraid to go to bed so I stayed up all night improving tiffr. You can now link your tiffr account to Twitter and we’ll tweet a few minutes before you head into each film. Pretty simple, pretty awesome.
There are a bunch of other changes throughout the site. I spent some time streamlining the Sign Up and Log In workflows so that new users can more easily get down to business. I also added an auto-refresh to the Shortlist so that if you’re adding films and keeping that page open, it will periodically update with your new selections. And, finally, I added a countdown-to-close to the bookmarklet window along with a button to get back to your shortlist, rather than just closing the window unceremoniously after adding a film.
Hope the new updates help save you some time and make using tiffr even easier!
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We’re really excited to announce a great new partnership with The Auteurs (theauteurs.com). If you’ve never heard of them, The Auteurs is a social web app that gives you the ability to watch a curated set of amazing films online (in incredibly high quality), discover films you may never have known about, and discuss film with other like-minded people. They have partnerships with the The Criterion Collection, Celluloid Dreams, Costa Films, and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation to digitize and disseminate important world cinema on the Internet.
As part of our collaboration, we’ve ditched our Browse Films page (for which we got more than a couple of suggestions for improvement), and replaced it with the more comprehensive film listing at The Auteurs. Additionally, while browsing The Auteurs you can now shortlist films directly on tiffr by using the Add to Schedule button underneath each film playing at TIFF09, or by using the bookmarklet, just as you would on the official TIFF site.
We’re really excited about the possibilities that this partnership brings and hope you love The Auteurs as much as we do!
Check out our accounts at The Auteurs and create your own!
Mina: http://www.theauteurs.com/users/57148
Ryan: http://www.theauteurs.com/users/78520More new features!
We’re still listening to your feature requests and suggestions and we’ve recently added a few small features that we know you’ll love. Check it out.
- A lot of people were asking for the film title on the Planner to bring you to the film details page so you could refresh your memory on the film, which is now how it works.
- There were a few requests to be able to compare your schedule to someone else’s. We’ve made it so that when you’re logged in and looking at someone else’s schedule, any screenings you have in common are clearly indicated with an “Attending” badge.
- To make it easier to discover new users, we’ve replaced the boring Highest Ranked list on the homepage with a Recently Updated list that shows users who’ve made fresh changes to their shortlists and schedules.
- We’ve connected our homepage to the tiffr Flickr group and are asking filmmakers to submit stills from their films to be featured on our homepage. It’s not limited to filmmakers of course, anyone with great TIFF shots from this year or previous years should post them to our group to add them to the rotation of images on the homepage. We’ve got a great start, but we’re always looking for more!
We’re not stopping here, there are still a bunch of great features we’ve got planned to help save you time and keep you organized for TIFF.
Stick around.
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We’ve been hard at work creating more time-saving features for tiffr, with a big announcement and deployment planned for this week, but I’ve been meaning to write this post for over a week now so I figured now is a great time to thank two people who were tremendous help in the first week tiffr was online with feedback and some incredible coding skills.
John Perieteanu and Dan McCormmick were instrumental in getting the site up to speed during that crucial last week of August and we can’t thank them enough. John used his massive Perl skills to quickly write us a script to get the live data into the database to begin with, which would have taken Ryan and I at least twice as long to do. Dan, a programmer and film lover himself, spent a couple of nights putting tiffr through its paces and offering constructive and specific feedback about everything from design to functionality. He even contributed some Python code to keep the database up to date with changes happening on the TIFF site that has proved super useful.
These guys are computer wizards to the nth degree and we can’t thank them enough for their amazing contributions!
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Ryan and I were so swamped implementing updates and new features to tiffr.com that we almost ran out of time to select our own films. We both stayed up pretty late last night going through all the films and whittling it all down to a handful of screenings. We just found out that Box 48 was drawn and since we were in Boxes 52 and 53, respectively, we’re pretty much guaranteed to get our picks, which is awesome. Bonus points for procrastination!
You can check out our schedules here:
http://tiffr.com/schedules/ryan
http://tiffr.com/schedules/mina
Let us know what you think!
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We love film and the people who make them and we want to give you an opportunity to showcase your film on our homepage. If you or someone you know has a film playing at TIFF09, get in touch with us and we can work together to add a nice, big still from your film to our rotating homepage with a small blurb describing your film and a link back to the TIFF page for your film or your official site.
Sound good?
