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A faster BBC News front page

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#121

Post by DamonHD »

acdha wrote: post #117
DamonHD wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the work would be essentially quick and one-off: no one blinks at minifying JS or CSS and I bet that 50% of this would be entirely the same and at low dev cost. I entirely see your point, but disagree that it's not worth doing any of it, given an almost certain quick small win + saving CPU time and bandwidth and a bit of planet while we're at it!

> Most of the work would be essentially quick and one-off: Again, think about the complexity of what's generating that content. Do you really think they have a single index.html template floating around rather than the system described pulling blocks of content in from various sources, all of which need to be updated in various places? You could build a system to collapse whitespace runs after the content is generate…

I'm not saying don't do the other things too, but a ~5% saving (maybe more at a more typical gzip TX setting) for no semantic change at all saves some outgoing BBC resource but is more significant for the RX side in CPU, etc.

Anyhow we can agree to disagree but many of my clients over the years have been very happy with 5% resource savings, although 5x is nicer when available... B^>

(And yes I'm fudging CPU and bandwidth, but with a compressor involved and the CPU often being a bottleneck on lower-end devices for example, I think that simplification can be justified.)

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#123

Post by cJ0th »

ThomaszKrueger wrote: post #83

And this has a sort-of easter egg: if you open developer tools in Chrome when at the page, they invite you to apply for developer jobs: Hi there! Do you want to help build a fast and accessible web experience used by over 300 million people around the world each month? We're hiring people for all sorts of roles. Head on over to http://careerssearch.bbc.co.uk/ (search for "News") to find out more!

As a long time Internet user I could actually imagine myself becoming passionate about "Make The Internet Fast Again". I wonder how one would start a career in that direction. It's a bit of a dilemma: In order to build fast modern websites you probably need to know how to build horrible modern websites. And I can't really motivate myself to imitate horrendous websites just for kicks. In fact, I stopped creating websites when jQuery wasn't enough anymore. In other words, more than ten years ago... It's not that I shun more recent technologies, I am willing to learn. I just don't want to create Frankensteinish websites first.

Any tips for a more direct path towards website optimization jobs?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#124

Post by nailer »

marbletiles wrote: post #110
nailer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because as a recipe for success, riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product is not a great one. That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. The point is that non-data backed opinions belonging to anyone don't matter so much as the results of what you actually measure. > It's not a pure Buzzfeed competitor -- it exists to serve the public purpos…

> That's a gross mischaracterisation of data-driven decision making. It is! And I'm v. pro D-DDM. But as I read your post -- given it has been flagged to death I don't think I'm alone -- you didn't appear to be calling for that. As I recall, you appeared to be saying "who cares what editorial think, work out what you want and get some damn data" (which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw).

> which is where the straw man comes from, fwiw

No. I wrote:

>> Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.

Which is quite different from:

> riding roughshod over the opinions of 2000+ people who make all the content in your product

I hope you don't need it explained, but just in case: we're ignoring all things not backed by data, which very different from ignoring a specific subset of people.

The downvotes are for my saying 'damn' and writing angrily (ie, being pissed off with the poor engineering discipline of the public service). I'm intending to leave this thread, however, and enjoy the downvotes as "editorial doesn't like it" is frankly pathetic.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#125

Post by learntofly »

Thanks for sharing.

I'm assuming you are happy to receive feedback?

Does the cookie statement have to be so large? On first load it takes up ~ 3/4 of my usable screen space on an iPhone 5S in safari? It also feels unusual to be at the top of the page as opposed to hovering over some space at the bottom of the page.

Also on iOS lots of unnecessary line spacing (to the right of images) occurs when listing headlines.. image heigh, font size and line spacing could be worked to look better.

Congratulation on achieving the performance gains however :)

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#126

Post by _wmd »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #21
afandian wrote: post #11

Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive). There is a small improvement to…

Hey Joseph,

You're doing God's work and a national service that is IMHO worthy of a knighthood, the BBC front page is one of those rare places where a few little engineering cogs can really make a huge difference. Keep up the good fight! Thanks from all of us -- the UK, still missing the old news.bbc 5ish years later :)

And if I ever have the privilege of your CV gracing my inbox, I'd do everything to ensure we got to work together. Thanks again!

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#129

Post by sjwright »

cnorthwood wrote: post #19
lol768 wrote: post #12

> It is available over HTTPS, and we have plans to redirect insecure traffic to HTTPS in the not-so-distant future. ~ curl -I https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Type: text/html Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 09:33:49 GMT Location: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/0 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 0 What annoys me most about this is that there is a valid GlobalSign SSL certificate there and th…

Hi, BBC employee here (although not in News). Basically, we're working on it. The main issue is that by making a page HTTPS only, that all content also needs to be HTTPS too. We're working with our CDN providers to enable that (not only for new content, but for our archive too), and we also have to support a much longer tail of browsers and SSL configurations than other sites (China being an important market for us,…

I think you'll find that the vast majority of old browsers coming from China are in fact robots/spiders hard-coded with MSIE user agent strings.
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