From the editor's desktop - extra

There were stacks of technical questions last week. Kevin Hinde, the head of technical development on the BBC News website, tackles some of them.

Emma Griffiths from Bristol, UK, asked if we could make available a copy of our main front page for each day as an archive feature.

This would be a great feature. We could archive the front page at four in the afternoon - or perhaps at regular intervals (every three hours?) - or we could just present a list of all the stories that were published on a particular day, in order. It's just a matter of deciding what's the best way to do it.

We have a huge list of things we'd like to build - usually, if you wonder why something you'd like isn't available on the site, it's because we haven't got round to it - if readers write in and let us know what features they would find most useful, it helps us decide what to put at the top of the list.

Jolin Warren wrote: "A suggestion regarding the 'related stories' links is that maybe you could somehow include links to BBC News stories that are written "after" the story being viewed. If you coded each story with a subject (eg. 'MG Rover'), then the links on the right side could contain all links related to that subject. So if I view an MG Rover story from December, the related stories links would include the most recent stories because they have the same subject. I'm sure it wouldn't be so simple in practice, and deciding on actual subjects could be troublesome, but it's just an idea for you to think about. One (much smaller) website that has forward links in its stories database is TidBITS.

We've talked about this inside the department a fair amount over the years - the basic problem is that we have far more forward links than TidBITS do - if we just put them all up on a story page it would look cluttered and confusing - so we have to find a way to make this manageable. We do produce a set of the most important links for big subjects - if you look at Tories criticise Rover collapse for example, they are in the box (headed "MG Rover Collapse") on the right hand side of the story. This box is updated so it will contain links to stories published after the original story. Our internal jargon word for these boxes is "hyperpuffs".

Emrol Gould, Port of Spain, Trinidad: "A desktop ticker/alerts for Mac users would be nice."

Yes, we agree - many of us here in the development team are Mac fans - the next version of the desktop ticker, available later this year, will work on the Mac.

Alex Bennee, Manchester, UK: "It's good to see you reviewing your site design in an effort to stay accessible. However is there anyway you could consider supplying direct links to your media stories? Plug-ins required for Realplayer tend to be patchy when run on non-windows systems but with a little persuasion I can just about get them running if I have the direct url for the stream rather than trying to figure it out from your media console. Of course I appreciate this is just a stop gap measure until the BBC gets round to rolling out Ogg and Theora for its multimedia output. I'll have no problem watching/listening to that media."

Yes, we would like to supply this. At the moment media clips are designed to be used in our audio-video console as this provides extra navigational features and tools, so we are working out the best way to supply direct links. In the meantime, you can try using this unofficial service which has links to RSS files and simple HTML pages, for all of the broadband and narrowband clips which BBC News delivers in its Audio Video console.

We did run a trial of Ogg Vorbis streaming - you can see the details here, but we currently have no plans to roll out Ogg or Theora.

Andrew White, Sao Paulo, Brazil: "Your main top-of-page ticker can often change before less speedy users get time to click on the currently displayed headline. Rather than making it run slower, could it not just freeze when the cursor is over it? My mum would be so grateful!"

That's a good idea, we should do that.

Jake, Lancaster, UK: "What program does the BBC use to update all its squillions of pages? Whatever it is, it must be a very good one. Also I've had a quick look at all the restrictions for web design in the BBC and it's a wee bit harsh... isn't it?"

Different parts of the BBC use different software to update their pages - here in BBC News, we don't use a single program you could buy in a shop. We have designed and built our own system to suit our own specialised needs.

The system is composed of commercial and open-source software - we have components which are built using Microsoft Visual Basic and .NET, Oracle, Perl, Apple WebObjects (Objective-C and Java), Apache, Jetspeed, Zeus C++, Autonomy, FlipFactory and Documentum (and this is not the complete list...). As you can imagine, the whole thing is quite complex. I wrote an article last week which gives a very high level overview of how our site is served.

On your point about restrictions for web design - we have to be harsh to make our web pages work on a wide range of browsers and operating systems, and to follow accessibility guidelines. Harsh but fair.

David Thomson, New York, US: "Video is something that I miss. I'm from Edinburgh but now living in New York and I do tend to watch Newsnight (still the best news programme in the world) when I can... but it is still only in 34kbps. I subscribed briefly to the hi res bbc news on realplayer but you only get the bulletins. I would love to see Newsnight at 250kbps or 350kbps and I know many people here, including myself that would happily pay for these shows (I'd pay the whole licence fee if I could get the video stream...)"

Paul Clabburn, our editor of A/V and broadband services, replies: "We're currently preparing to trial some news programmes, including Question Time, in broadband for UK users. We'll then have a look at what we can do in association with Real for overseas users. One of the main problems for us is rights."