Welcome to the early days of the Unofficial BBC News Lab, which I hope will grow into a selection of neat and interesting scripts to demonstrate cool things you can do with the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news).
I hope to build a proper website for this as soon as I get time :)
Disclaimer: This website is in no way connected to the BBC's official output. Work produced on this website is strictly my own intellectual property produced in my own time, mingled with open source code from the open source community. All text, assets and news material are taken from the publicly available html and xml pages produced by BBC News Interactive. I make no guarantees for the accuracy, availability and timeliness of any of these services - on this front you will always be better served using the BBC News website directly.
Finally, I've got around to building an RSS feed of tube delays on the London Underground - I hope you find it as useful as I do...!
Seeing as this NOTHING to do with BBC News, I decided to put it on a different page: http://bbcnews.benmetcalfe.com/londontubedelays/
Want to read the latest news stories from BBC News and BBC Sport on the train, but don't have a fancy PDA or laptop? Or you travel underground and thus can't get a GPRS connection? Or maybe you just like to read from good ol' paper? Well, this script will let you select the BBC News and BBC Sport sections you want to read news from and produce a digest of the top stories from each section (you even get to choose how many stories you want per index).
(Don't forget to bookmark the digest url if you want to be able to quickly access your selection in the future!)
In a nutshell it enables you to view the latest news from BBC News in Audio Video via light HTML pages rather than being forced into viewing them in the "BBC News Player". There is also a syndication option via an RSS feed.
Many would argue that the official "BBC News Player", being a frames-based proposition in a popup with HTML embedded player, is a little "backwards". I couldn't possibly comment, but what I will say is that I built the News and Sport players to meet the editorial requirements and overall departmental objectives I was given.
This is my opportunity to (begin to) offer what I what I would have produced given completely free reign of the editorial brief. In particular, I am looking achieve something which focuses more on stripped-down-ultra-quick-access, better accessibility for those with assistive technology and syndication uses (the rss feed)
UPDATE 12 Oct: I've updated the script to v1.1 so that there is a separate XML feed for each bandwidth/format combination.
You can either…
Please feel free to email me with your comment: bbcnewslab at benmetcalfe.com