Must be a bug or other error. US presidential terms end on January 20, so it definitely wouldn't be before then. According to Wikipedia inauguration is held on the 20, unless it's a Sunday in which case it's held the next day.
Yes, it was a timezone bug. The page was tracking January 20 (but at midnight in UTC timezone), so some people would see Jan 19, some Jan 20. It's now fixed.
This looks like kind of a fun project, but Google already returns at least some of this information in their enhanced search results (ex: "When is Fathers Day").
But, you'd have to go do that search for Father's Day where this interface reminds you, like a Calendar, that something is coming up that maybe wasn't on your mind atm.
This is one of those cool websites that when I open for the first time I usually say : "Oh that's awesome, I should bookmark it and use more often" and then after 1 hour It's totally forgotten until the next time I clean my bookmarks.
Anyway TV Shows episode calendar is really useful and I think it's a nice idea to have this information arranged in this way.
maybe check out https://trakt.tv/, I have been using it for more than 3 years and it's absolutely amazing. It even has multiple mobile apps, I personally use SeriesGuide on my android phone.
I had the same use case as you, so I built a similar app except instead of a GUI, it sends me a text message. Right now I have it fire when a new episode of Silicon Valley is posted.
I really should polish it up and release it. This is the second or third thread where other people have mentioned a similar need.
Several other people have commented on their solutions, but my favorite solution is tvmaze.com/calendar
It's easy to create an account and mark your favorite shows so you get a custom calendar, or you can view a calendar with the overall most popular shows.
Kind of dropped the ball on the url. days.to is great, but days.to/until/christmas is kind of wonky. I'd remove the /until/ part so it's just days.to/christmas
All the countdowns will use your computer/phones local timezone.
If you're counting to a date (without a particular time), you'll get the remaining time to midnight in your own timezone. If it's an event with a time, you'll see the start time of the event shown in your local timezone (but the countdown/remaining time will be same everywhere).
So obviously this site is built 100% with SEO in mind. The domain name and the fact that each event is its own page with the most obvious searchable title.
I think most of the time it's because everyone has experienced getting low quality results from SEO optimized sites. It's getting to the point where one cannot shop or search for product recommendations on popular search engines because you'll get nothing but toptenreallyspecificproduct.com or absolutebestproduct.com.
Optimizing for search rankings doesn't say anything directly about any given site, but it's generally a signal for low quality content that would not rank highly without such optimizations.
The only time I use Google to find a product is when I know need something but don't know what it's called exactly. Otherwise I just go to the relevant e-commerce site to skip past all the BS.
How so? I pointed it out because I think people in here are interested in SEO and I wanted to highlight that this page is a good example of effective SEO. They do things right.
It's obviously an SEO focused site so NOT bringing up SEO would be odd if anything. It's more or less why this site exists.
> The things you listed (domain & titles) sum up to: "Created something and it's easy to find, with clear descriptions".
Yes, like it should. However, a lot of titles would be "good" but this is clearly constructed to fetch most of these kind of queries. You would think people search by using more condensen queries but I'm sure "how many days until X" has been researched and shown to be the most common way. People often ask their search engine like they're asking a real person, even if it's more verbose.
For this to be somewhat useful should have much more data about every country in the world. I don't really care about any of those dates... maybe us elections because it has an international relevance.
Or find a niche like mountain bike, and list all the mountainbiking events
I always use something like https://days.to/since/new-years-day to check when eggs are packaged. All eggs (in the USA at least) have a three digit code showing the date it was packaged on the end of the carton. Helps to see how old the eggs are at the market.
Cool idea, I would love support for geolocated events. We have a set of country fairs in Connecticut that start in August and end in October. It would be a cool application for location
Gotta second the geolocated events, for most the fluff festival in Somerville MA isn't on their radar. For locals though, it's always on the back of our minds (this weekend by the way)
The challenge is how to get all this local knowledge into the system. This seems to be more specialized knowledge that perhaps even Google does not have easily organized.
Neat! Good form factor, as it lets me explore things I'd otherwise never think of (mostly, cultural events in other cultures), but...
...Doesn't have what I care about (festivals), does have what I really don't care about (sports). Can you add a filter so I can remove the latter? Not sure what you can do about the former - data sources / input is the hard part, I'm pretty sure :P
* Is it necessary to go to a url when one clicks on an event? The amount of information displayed is tiny (date, event title, time until event) and it's a waste of screen space and time (now I have to go back to look at other things). It would be cool to show the information in a modal box and then continue to browse what's coming up.
* Okay, now I'm on days.to and I know that an event will take place in two months. Then what? I leave the site and in a few days, I forget about it. I think I stumbled upon an email feature but I couldn't find it again. It also has a calendar. Why? Would it be better to build on something a large number of people are already using and trusting to manage their daily lives? Something like Google Calendar or Facebook Events. Maybe using their API to insert an event into the already existing calendar. Even if I leave days.to, I can still see the positive it brought to my life and I'm more likely to come back.
* Maybe topics. I push in some interests. With enough users, it might start detecting certain patterns and starts showing me upcoming events resulting from the interests of people who share some of my interests. If I like music and painting, and you like music and theatre, it might show me theatre events and show you painting events.
Been using this site before and the only thing which bothers me is the moving background color. While it is a nice addition on desktop, it makes my 2015 Macbook's fans blow after some seconds.
I would suggest looking for less computing intensive way to make the backgrounds work like they do now.
Either way, it's not a huge deal since I seldom watch the site for longer than those few seconds, but I have clicked the alternative links on Google a few times just to see if they would function any better.
Thanks for the feedback. The blurry coloured backgrounds are just images (placeholder images really) but they transition in using CSS. This is a bit more obvious on the pages that have a "proper" background image.
I'll look at adding an option to allow users to disable the transitions.
Just a design tip: the red border that separates the full date from the days till countdown is completely unnecessary. Also, a bit bigger dark gradient behind it would be nice. Also, when hovering over the top menu the link goes dark enough to be hard to read, so perhaps not change the color on hover, but add a border underneath the link instead to hint that the link is being in fact hovered?
77 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadThe reason for 2 events/pages are that they are tracking different events.
1) The day of the inauguration (start of the day) 2) The start time of the inauguration ceremony (12pm ET on the 20th).
The latter will allow you to count down the time to the start of the ceremony in your local timezone.
Anyway TV Shows episode calendar is really useful and I think it's a nice idea to have this information arranged in this way.
They send emails for new episodes, and also allow you to mark episodes as watched, which is great for working through archives.
I only wish they had something for movies as well.
I really should polish it up and release it. This is the second or third thread where other people have mentioned a similar need.
It's easy to create an account and mark your favorite shows so you get a custom calendar, or you can view a calendar with the overall most popular shows.
There's also a /since/ for each one.
A simple fix, use days.to/next/christmas and days.to/last/christmas. Clean URLs, and they make grammatical sense.
Originally, the site had exactly as you described with a cleaner url, but SEO had different ideas.
It would be extra cool if it considered each person's local timezone.
If you're counting to a date (without a particular time), you'll get the remaining time to midnight in your own timezone. If it's an event with a time, you'll see the start time of the event shown in your local timezone (but the countdown/remaining time will be same everywhere).
days.to/until/summer showed the days until summer ended. It was great!
Simple, to the point, beautiful.
days.to/until/summer(is Over)
Good job anyway! Looks really good.
The things you listed (domain & titles) sum up to: "Created something and it's easy to find, with clear descriptions".
It seems like a really odd point to bring up.
Optimizing for search rankings doesn't say anything directly about any given site, but it's generally a signal for low quality content that would not rank highly without such optimizations.
How so? I pointed it out because I think people in here are interested in SEO and I wanted to highlight that this page is a good example of effective SEO. They do things right.
It's obviously an SEO focused site so NOT bringing up SEO would be odd if anything. It's more or less why this site exists.
I didn't say it was bad.
> The things you listed (domain & titles) sum up to: "Created something and it's easy to find, with clear descriptions".
Yes, like it should. However, a lot of titles would be "good" but this is clearly constructed to fetch most of these kind of queries. You would think people search by using more condensen queries but I'm sure "how many days until X" has been researched and shown to be the most common way. People often ask their search engine like they're asking a real person, even if it's more verbose.
Or find a niche like mountain bike, and list all the mountainbiking events
http://www.spacex.com/mars
How would you go about doing that?
* Is it necessary to go to a url when one clicks on an event? The amount of information displayed is tiny (date, event title, time until event) and it's a waste of screen space and time (now I have to go back to look at other things). It would be cool to show the information in a modal box and then continue to browse what's coming up.
* Okay, now I'm on days.to and I know that an event will take place in two months. Then what? I leave the site and in a few days, I forget about it. I think I stumbled upon an email feature but I couldn't find it again. It also has a calendar. Why? Would it be better to build on something a large number of people are already using and trusting to manage their daily lives? Something like Google Calendar or Facebook Events. Maybe using their API to insert an event into the already existing calendar. Even if I leave days.to, I can still see the positive it brought to my life and I'm more likely to come back.
* Maybe topics. I push in some interests. With enough users, it might start detecting certain patterns and starts showing me upcoming events resulting from the interests of people who share some of my interests. If I like music and painting, and you like music and theatre, it might show me theatre events and show you painting events.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=days+until+doctor+stran...
I would suggest looking for less computing intensive way to make the backgrounds work like they do now.
Either way, it's not a huge deal since I seldom watch the site for longer than those few seconds, but I have clicked the alternative links on Google a few times just to see if they would function any better.
I'll look at adding an option to allow users to disable the transitions.