Alex Muller

Jeremy Keith recently huffduffed a conversation about digital preservation. It revolves around the creation of archiving software that will hopefully help reduce the impact of link rot on the web.

(That conversation is interesting, and you should definitely have a listen. What follows is only tangentially related.)

This audio got me thinking about something that had always niggled at me in the past: the BBC not updating old article styles when they change the appearance of BBC News. Take, for example, what must be one of the most viewed BBC News articles of all time: “US rocked by terror attacks”, published on Tuesday 11 September 2001.

The BBC News site has gone through a thousand and one different looks over the last ten years (most of which spent a few weeks receiving hateful comments), but that article still looks exactly as it did on the day it was published. Contrast that with similar articles dated 2001 from The Guardian, Wired and The New York Times, and you can see they all match the current look of the site they’re a part of.

What the BBC are doing had always bothered me subconsciously, and now something’s changed. I’m not sure if it’s the audio that Jeremy posted which has swayed me, but suddenly I find myself really liking what the BBC are doing. I love that that article is still at exactly the same URL it was when it was published. I love that the source is filled with <table>s, <map>s and <font>s. And I love that the whole thing is 600 pixels wide.

It’s a piece of history. Even though the BBC have been criticised by many for taking historical content offline (including Jeremy, who hosts a sample of that content), I hadn’t realised how much I appreciate everything they put into BBC News.

I’m going to try my best to do the same with everything I publish:

1. URLs that never change.
2. Individual articles that look exactly as they did when they were published.

The first will be a challenge, since I’m already falling out of love with this domain name.

As to the second, I’ve made a start using the Custom Post Template plugin for WordPress. My post on York a year before I arrived here (reading that again is so odd) looks almost exactly as it did when it was first posted. (Yorkies: the Louis mentioned in that post is Louis Rose.)

And if I move away from WordPress in the future, it should be relatively easy to just keep shuffling the plain old HTML around so that everything keeps looking the same.

Most of all, I love that that York post now looks as old as it is. It was written by a sixteen-year-old in 2007, and it should look like it was designed by one too.

I saw some of the talk about the Express article on the BBC’s Twitter presence, but never bothered to go in search and read it. After seeing Rowan taking it apart, I had to see the original.

Oh. The Express site reports that:

The article you are looking for does not exist. It may have been deleted.

Pffft. They’ve already lost my respect, but they could have perhaps clawed a tiny part back by leaving a proper apology in its place.

So, now I wanted to see the original even more. It’s fantastic; here you go:

The mother of a nine-year-old boy has lodged a complaint after her son was stopped and searched by police.

BBC News, August 18^th, 2009

So let’s take a look at the facts here:

1. with friends in Camberwell, south London

   South London isn’t a particularly nice place; and that’s not just me being stereotypical and rude. Take a look at South London Press Today, or the map I created of teenage killings in London.

2. Police are legally able to search children under the age of 10

   That doesn’t mean they should, sure – but they absolutely can. From the kick off, she doesn’t seem to have much of a leg to stand on.

3. “Looking at him you can see he is not a suspect,” she added.

   No, Sandra, you think he’s not a suspect. Because he’s your son. To me, my friends, the police and everyone else, he probably looks as thuggish as every other kid. Maybe more, maybe less.

4. “It is not possible for a nine-year-old to commit a criminal offence.”

   Whoop-di-fucking-do. We should definitely let all the nine-year-olds out there just walk around with knives that they’ve picked up from home then. In fact, let’s start handing them out. Jesus. Also, this quote is stupid; common sense dictates that it is possible for a nine-year-old to commit a criminal offence, but it’s not possible to convict them for it. IANAL and all that.

5. Jadan Shepherd was searched while he was sitting on a wall

   He’s called Jadan Shepherd. Kidding, kidding, that’s not a reason. Kind of.