Kevin Hinde (Head of Technical Development for BBC News Interactive, and my old boss) has written an article called “The BBC News website – under the bonnet”.
It was written in response to Pete Clifton’s excellent “From the Editor’s Desktop” column – where several of Pete’s users (sorry, audience – in joke) asked how they could find out more about the technical side of the BBC News Website.
Kevin’s written a fairly simplistic over-view, arguably at the level of anyone who can switch a computer on… I think we should be explaining in a lot more depth and detail how the technical side of the BBC News site is run and operated.
With that in mind I may try to incorporate some Channel 9-style video interviews with key technical people into backstage.bbc.co.uk. I’m going to start a video interview series with BBC people involved in backstage.bbc.co.uk projects, so there maybe scope to widen this to “any cool BBC project” if there’s interest. We’ll see (and let me know)
Hey Ben,
Yeah I was looking forward to the technical thing and it was a bit of a disappointment. I suspect most of us already knew the vast majority of it. I have seen the support subdomain before, and obviously optimising apache is important in a large website.
What would have been more interesting would have been to learn such things as how many BBC servers are on round robin for the main news site, what kind of database backend the BBC runs, or is it out of files with a custom interface.
How does the SSI include links that are relevant to stories posted after the date? Is there a kind of trackback based around subjects with CGI delivering the links for SSI inclusion or what…
Anyway, thats going a bit off the point, as you said, it would be great to see a new and more technical article later in the week or something! 🙂