5 years on - how the BBC homepage covered the 7/7 London bombings
5 years ago today I was struggling to get across London to the BBC's offices in White City, where I was in charge of the technical delivery of the BBC homepage. I blogged about it at the time, and made a Flickr gallery showing 20 different versions of the BBC's homepage as the story of the terrorist attack on London unfolded.
My much missed colleague Doug posted up a graph of the RealMedia served by the BBC that day - 50,000+ streams and 10gigbits/sec of bandwidth. I'm sure those figures have been dwarfed by the amount of data transmitted to stream the World Cup over the last couple of weeks, but in those pre-iPlayer days, it was absolutely unprecedented.
A week later, we produced a special version of the homepage to mark the day of remembrance for the victims of the London Underground suicide bombings.
One thing I forgot to add was that as part of the tenth anniversary celebrations of BBC Online, I wrote this blog post about the BBC website on July 7th for the BBC Internet blog
I still remember that day quite clearly. Gemma Garmeson was working on the page actively at that time, and by the time I managed to get across London by bus and foot it had already gone past the point where we could reliably serve the 'low graphics' version, so Nick Holmes and Gemma had put my slightly dusty unapproved experimental ultra-low bandwidth version live. It was only ever meant as an experiment on how slim I could get the code and how few images I could get away with whilst the page still mostly resembled the 'proper' low graphics version, whilst being semantically correct XHTML with a CSS+p layout. As it happened it saved our bacon - but it did annoy (literally) 2-3 Mac users who were still using IE on a Mac... They were BBC Mac users of course, not actual members of the public. It actually turned out the be a baptism by fire for the BBC website switching from mandating table based layouts, and was fortunately successful.
Still, it was a very strange and sad day.