The Wardman Wire

[Update 2/1/2008: Matthew Somerville, who developed the BBC Homepage Archive service, comments:

"One caution: the archive updates run about a month behind the current date." - this isn't true, it was always up to the minute. It appears that the BBC simply stopped it running back in mid-November, I'm sorry to see that, perhaps linked to the new home page work? My BBC News front page archive is still running on my own server.]

The BBC provides an archive service, which lets visitors track changes in the bbc.co.uk Homepage retrospectively.

The archives go back to May 2005. Here, for example is a screenshot of the Home Page as it was when the Cutty Sark fire was reported at 8.05am on the morning of 21st May 2007.

The service enables you to navigate through the BBC site by time as well as topic – if, for example, you remember that “something was on the website before I went to work” on a particular day. This is the description of the service:

The Home Archive is a new service, developed to produce a comprehensive library of how the BBC Homepage changes throughout each day. It was developed by Matthew Somerville (the BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites) and was an initiative begun on backstage.bbc.co.uk.

Here, you are able to see the latest changes that have gone through on the Homepage, section by section. Also if you click on the ‘Time’ links on the left hand side of the main column you can see a ’snapshot’ of how the page appeared at that time. The archive goes back to July 14, 2005 and if you click on browse by date you can view how the Homepage changed throughout each day and
also how it looked at a particular time.

Not every change on the Homepage is recorded, however, for example, changes to the weather forecast. Everything else is tracked though, including when the page changes to breaking news or sport or when the main promotion slot changes to full page.

The links:

• Homearchive Service
• (Service now available on Matthew Somerville’s home site]
• Browse Homepages by Date

A useful service.

One caution: the archive updates run about a month behind the current date.

Tags: matthew somerville, bbc homepage archive, bbc backstage blog[tags]matthew somerville, bbc homepage archive, bbc backstage blog[/tags]