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Jake Macmullin (BBC)

Listed below are comments made by Jake Macmullin (BBC) between Wednesday, 4th March 2009 and Tuesday, 21st July 2009.

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BBC News Radar 04:53am on 21 Jul 2009 Guv-nor and shambles: Sorry about the outage, it is back online now.

As News Radar is a prototype or 'Beta' website, we can't dedicate the same resources to supporting it as we do for the rest of our websites. As such, it may be unavailable from time to time - or it may (as you've noticed) fail to update occasionally.

On this occasion, there was a problem caused by a recent update to one of our other systems that News Radar relies upon. Unfortunately, this problem required a little bit of development work to fix and I've only been able to do that work today. While we can't guarantee News Radar will always be available, a week without updates is much longer than I would've liked. Sorry about this.

The good news is that it is back up and running again now and updating as new stories are published.
BBC News radar 10:31pm on 02 Apr 2009 gottago: Thanks for your feedback and 'bug report'.

The fact you use this site to "discover loads of regional stories that are of interest" that you mightn't have otherwise read is one of the main things that interests me in this sort of continuous list of news from across the whole site. It is why we called it the 'News Radar'. It helps you keep track of stories that might've otherwise slipped 'under the radar'.

I'll have a look in to the 'Newsline' bug - thanks for pointing it out. I'm sure everyone has noticed a few bugs from time to time. Whilst we certainly don't want to release 'fragile' code, the idea of releasing this as a 'Beta' or trial version is so that we can test out the idea and find out what people think before investing our time in getting it completely perfect - so I'm sure there may be a few other bugs from time to time too. Please let us know about them via the 'feedback' link at the top of the News Radar page.

Thanks once more to everyone for your thoughtful contributions.
BBC News radar 10:42am on 01 Apr 2009 tarquin: Thanks for your comment. I just want to clarify something you mentioned. We have no plans to replace the BBC front page (or any other part of the site) with something like this trial News Radar. This is something we're trying out as an additional way of viewing the news.
BBC News radar 6:22pm on 31 Mar 2009 Boilerplated: Thanks for all your suggestions. I agree that it is really important that we present information in a clear, informative way and that we cater for the widest audience possible. The things you have suggested (flexible layout, support for browsers without javascript, etc) are the sort of improvements we'll look at making if we decide to progress beyond a 'Beta'.

At the moment we'd really like to know what you think of the *idea*. Do you think it is worthwhile having a page that displays an updated list of the most recent stories? What functionality do you think is required for such a page to be useful?

Based on the feedback we get from this 'Beta' we'll be able to think about:
1) whether or not we should offer this sort of 'feed'
2) what features it should/shouldn't have
3) how we can improve the user experience

Thanks again for your feedback - it is appreciated.
BBC News radar 5:17pm on 31 Mar 2009 Thanks all for your comments so far. I'm the developer who has worked on this 'Beta' version of News Radar. I really appreciate that you're taking the time to try it out and share your thoughts with us.

One of the main reasons that we've released this as a 'Beta' (or test version) is to find out the sort of features that you'd most like to see so that we can make sure any time we spend working on this application is well spent working on the things you'd most like to see. I think the idea of providing some way of 'filtering' the list is very good idea - either based on the section of the site a story was published in or based on the 'type' of story it is (eg. text or video).

var42605: We are actually displaying the section each story has been filed in - have a look at the grey text in the top right-hand corner of each story 'item'. Is this what you were after? Or would you like even more information?

Thanks again for taking the time to look at the site.
BBC News Radar 10:48pm on 04 Mar 2009 Thanks everyone for taking the time to try the News Radar Beta and share your thoughts with us here.

Ed Lyons: I like your idea of showing changes - are you thinking of seeing changes in the headline/summary highlighted on the page itself - or were you thinking more along the lines of navigating to a different page showing a 'diff' between two different versions of the story?

BigBadDaveB: Yes - an RSS feed would be a very sensible addition (I can't believe we left it out... oops ;-) ).
BBC News Radar 10:37pm on 04 Mar 2009 Thank you all for taking the time to have a look at the News Radar Beta and to share your thoughts here.

You've made some great suggestions. I like the idea of being able to personalise the feed of stories - and the idea of including a panel on the News front page is a good one (though we'll have to do much more testing before we think about that. This Beta is currently only getting a few hundred hits a day - compared with hundreds of thousands for any one page on the News site).

A number of people have requested an RSS feed (via other feedback mechanisms) - and in retrospect this seems like an obvious omission.

johndrinkwater: Your point about javascript is a valid one - it really needn't be required to simply display the list of stories - but is used to update the list without having to reload the whole page. If we were to move this site from Beta, we'd certainly have to think about how the site 'degrades' nicely for people without javascript. Just out of interest - why don't you have javascript enabled?

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