TV Scheduling

Traditional TV listings are great at telling you what's on now. But they give you a list of all 100+ channels filled with reruns or shows you'd never watch. So where do you go if you want to schedule your DVR? Or just find out when your favorite shows have new episodes? I've found two useful sources for just that: CAT and TVRage. Neither looks so hot until you've registered and selected the shows you want to track, but once you do, both will give you a customized listing of your favorite shows' new episodes and nothing else. Past the jump, find out what each does best.

First, we'll look at CAT (or TV CAT or pogdesign... I'm not entirely sure what to call it). It looks pretty ugly when you first go there, but that's just because all the display options are on by default. The advantages of this site are a simple setup process and a very clean interface. Once you register (from the link in the top right corner), you can follow the link in the top center (the "0/145" link next to "Select Shows") to pick the shows you want to track from a list. This way, the calendar isn't cluttered with shows you're not going to watch. When you're done picking those, click the "Save Filter" button at the bottom, and it'll take you back to the calendar. Finally, check out the settings button in the top right to decide how much info you want displayed on the page. Personally, I like to have as little clutter as possible. You'll get a whole month's calendar, but since that won't fit here, check out the bottom left corner of April for me:


You may notice a couple other key features at this point. There's a whole lot of color coding going on. The current date is highlighted in orange (I took the snapshot on the 30th), regular episodes are in white, season/series premieres are also orange, and green is for episodes you've already seen. You'll notice the "<" and ">" symbols next to each episode. Clicking on those indicates that you've seen the episode and will toggle the listing of that show between green and white. So I can just scan the calendar for past episodes in white to figure out what I need to catch up on (like the Sopranos and Entourage).

Pretty cool, eh? There are a couple drawbacks for me. First, the selection of shows is slightly limited, and they're sometimes slow to add new ones. Most of your favorites will be on the list, but new shows, especially ones on cable that don't get much hype, don't always appear on the site. And I've found a few mistakes in their listings (like it listing an episode of Drive on 4/30 when it had already been canceled). Nothing too big, but just to warn you that if there's a show you can't miss, you might want to double check to be sure you're not missing anything.

Now TV Rage personalized listings are more of a hassle to set up, the interface isn't as cool, it's not as helpful for looking into the future, and it doesn't keep track of what you've watched, but it does have a killer feature: customized RSS feeds. I discussed RSS feeds not long ago, so check out that post for a brief overview of what they are.

To get all set up for TV Rage, you register (the button should be in the top right), select your favorite shows (the "My Shows" link in the lower left menu), and get a link for your own RSS feed (the "RSS Feeds" link in the left menu). Copy that link and add it to your RSS reader and you're good to go. The selecting of shows can be time consuming if you want to track a lot of them. You have to search for them one at a time, there's no list to select from like CAT. I ended up with a little over 50, so it took quite a while. But in the end it was worth it, because every morning I'm now greeted with a nice list of what's on later that night:


There are some other nice features of TV Rage, but I've only just started playing around with the site recently. The front page is customizable (see the image at the top of this post) and there's a "My Schedule" section where you can look ahead to see what new episodes are coming up (though not in as nice a format as CAT). Aside from scheduling, the site looks like it's aiming to be sort of like tv.com with episode-by-episode information on various shows, and areas to interact with other users. But for now, I'm just in it for the RSS feed.