better epguides

By moopet — Last update Feb 8, 2009 — Installed 221 times.

Script Summary:
improves usability of epguides.com
Version: 0.21

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First, a warning: this script is a work in progress, and is not complete. However, it is usable.

epguides.com is a good, simple site which lists airdates for TV episodes. Well, it was a good site until it became too integrated with TV.com. The content is good, but the HTML is pretty bad, the navigation is crap and it looks ugly.

So this script does some useful things:

Removes information that's completely useless to most people (production numbers?)
Attempts to replace the unformatted text with structured markup wherever possible
Fits more on the page by shifting cast and cast photo to a second column
Removes links to TV.com, amazon, etc.
Adds internal navigation (jump to season)
Adds external navigation (imdb, wikipedia, torrent sites)
Adds a proper search which takes you directly to the page
Colourises the dates so you can quickly see which episodes have yet to air
Makes the interface look pretty (for certain values of "pretty")

Known bugs:

~~Episodes are often numbered out of sequence~~
~~Some episode numbers are 0 or duplicated~~
~~Some seasons appear more than once~~
Detecting which episodes are specials isn't 100%
Some pages have inconsistent font size
Some pages (eg "Lost") are quite broken with unclosed tags making things appear in the wrong columns

As an explanation most of the problems are because the original HTML is just plain, pre-formatted text which doesn't take consistent formatting from one page to another. So my re-working of it is hit-and-miss. Some pages display perfectly and others have glitches. Work in progress, like I said.

Comments welcome :)