How we built the new BBC Homepage
bbc.co.uk
How we built the new BBC Homepage
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#2Thanks for sharing the tech stack. Would love to read more about the curation kit and the microservice approach.
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#3Tons of tech buzzwords, yet the blog intercepts middle-clicks. I want to open your links in a new tab so I can read them when I'm done with your blog!
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#4Tons of tech buzzwords, yet the blog intercepts middle-clicks. I want to open your links in a new tab so I can read them when I'm done with your blog!
Its not intercepting Cmnd+Click (mac)
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#5It's like they monitored the front-page of HN everyday for a year, made a list of the top mentioned technologies and then gave that list to their management.
Their manager said "Your goal is to write a blog post mentioning each one of these technologies, and add links so it appears in dark-bold-blue text. If we don't have a project using a trendy tech-stack... you bust your ass and get something up and running."
The engineers balked... "but why?"
Then the boss said, "I'm tired of being ignored in 'Who's Hiring' on Hacker News. We make this article and they'll all come begging us for jobs. At the BBC we don't wait for news to come to us, we make the news. And THAT'S what we call journalism kids."
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#6I have not yet tested the new mobile site, but if the design of the normal site is anything to go by it will have been designed in hell by some teen demon reading too much Kafka.
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#7Hmm. While it's nice to push rendering out to clients for saving your server CPU, that can lead to a suboptimal mobile experience, requiring more CPU and battery power on the mobile device to work on the javascript and render the page. There are other factors, for sure, but you want to be keeping client side javascript down to a minimum.
Taking a quick spin through yslow in the mobile browser suggests they've got a number of areas to improve on to make the time to screen significantly better on mobile devices (even on a fast connection here it took several seconds to even start showing me content, and several more before it had finally loaded everything)
Given the world wide reach of the BBC, expecting high speed and low latency networks seems like a bad idea. In the US, 3G & 4G typically see 90-100ms latency per request. Mobile Yslow is reporting that they've got 21 javascript scripts alone on the page. IIRC The android browser will limit itself to 4 threads retrieving content typically so that's (21/4 * 100ms) 525ms just lost in latency requesting the javascript, let alone actually downloading it and the overhead of the javascript renderer. It's also pulling in content from 21 different websites, so at the bare minimum that's 21 DNS calls being made (with the same latency penalty!) A bunch of those are being done just to load a single piece of content too, which is a little crazy.
Don't get me wrong, the site looks good.. it's just for a 'mobile-first' experience, they seem to be missing the all important time-to-screen and giving the mobile user a lot of work to do.
A useful tool from google for analysing the site for both mobile and desktop: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
and a good talk from last year's Google I/O conference on optimising the mobile experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrA85a4ZIaM
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#8Amazing insight into how large organisations manage projects.
Re: How we built the new BBC Homepage
#9Thanks for sharing the tech stack. Would love to read more about the curation kit and the microservice approach.
I agree. More corporates should give these insights and don't care for a bit of bashing when they do.