How the site has been improved

Welcome to your new-look Chortle.

After months of work and considerable investment, the technology driving the site has been rewritten from top to bottom, providing a swathe of enhancements for all the news, reviews, listings and comedians’ profiles on the site.

Some of the immediate improvements you will notice include:

• A cleaner look and navigation for the comedians’ pages, making it easier to find the information you want (but note that acts are now indexed by first name, not surname)

• Listings on each comedian’s page about where they are playing next

• A complete list of news stories relating to each comedian, accessed from their profile page

• An end to bad links. The new, robust system won’t send you the wrong way.

• Blogs. We’ve added a new section on the left-hand menu where invited comedians will be publishing their online diaries. We’ve started with two of the most popular bloggers from the Fringe – Stephen Grant and Ray Peacock – and more will follow.

• More tickets available. We’re working with more agencies to offer you more tickets to comedy gigs than ever before.

• RSS feeds of our news headlines, enabling you to incorporate them into your own newsreaders or websites.

The new site has been built by Winchester-based IT company Powder Blue, who not only created the software powering Chortle, but successfully tackled the challenge of importing all the information from such a large site into the new database.

Chortle editor Steve Bennett said: ‘This marks the most fundamental change in the way Chortle works in its six-year history. It makes it easier to use and, crucially, will enable us to grow the site at a faster pace than ever before. Now this major relaunch has happened, we can start work on the next batch of enhancements planned over the coming months.’

Part of the new system is a link-up with the Comedy Booking technology, as used by such clubs as London’s Comedy Café, the Glee in Birmingham and Cardiff, and Jesters in Bristol. It gives club owners a cheap and reliable way of offering tickets online – and means that Chortle’s listings will be updated the instance any of the participating clubs’ line-ups change. Promoters and club owners wanting more details should visit the Comedy Booking website here.

Although we have thoroughly tested the new website, glitches are inevitable. If you spot anything that doesn’t look like it should be happening, please email feedback@chortle.co.uk

Published: 26 Sep 2006