Martin Belam looks at the ways in which the BBC uses navigation, search and classification as three different types of glue to bind together the content on bbc.co.uk. It also goes on to examine some prototype and beta services that might well form the BBC’s ‘glue’ of the future.
Managing the navigation, search and classification (’Glue’) at the BBC
Michael Heilemann dabbles with the Script.aculo.us JavaScript effects library to demonstrate how easily powerful effects can be added to enhance interactivity. Thought you were all that now you can do some Ajax? Turns out you’re not so hot, big boy, so get your chops around this.
Impress your friends with your scriptaculous display of effects
From Dec 12th’s 24 ways, a daily dose of web tutorials in the run up to Christmas.
Also see Easy AJAX with ProtoType
Steve Case, co-founder of AOL who recently resigned as a Time Warner director, wrote in an essay in The Washington Post on Sunday that “although I played a key role in bringing AOL and Time Warner together six years ago, it’s now my view that it would be best to ‘undo’ the merger by splitting Time Warner into several independent companies and allowing AOL to set off on its own path.”
Greg Yardley reports that del.icio.us is to join the Yahoo Family, adding to its stable of Web2.0 products such as Flickr. As Greg writes, hopefully this will mean they get much more stable servers to cope with the demand, but that Yahoo won’t impose their logins…
Rumour has it that the purchase price was around US$30m (£17m), valuing each of their 300,000 user’s bookmarks at $100. They’re definitely paying for the community not the technology.
Maybe I should have chosen WordPress instead of Serendipity - About.Com are, apparently… 
UPDATE: I switched in 2007!
We’re putting a lot of thought in at the moment for our transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5. We’re not the only ones waiting for the ‘tipping point’…
Harry Feucks from SitePoint says we have to wait for John, and I concur. Here is what John (phpeverywhere) says, including some notable Gotchas.
And let’s not forget that PHP 6 will be around soon. PHP Builder lists the changes in PHP 5, 5.1 and 6.
Greg Yardley writes that rumour has it that PriceGrabber is to be aquired by Gus plc, owners of Experian.
We’ve been running a limited trial of Price Grabber as an affiliate on one of our sites, Web User and I believe it’s doing a pretty good job for us so far — better than our previous slot of Amazon Affiliates.
We already feel that Price Grabber’s functionality is above and beyond that of its competitors, including Kelkoo, Price Runner and Froogle to name a few, but hopefully this merger will result in some investment.
Update: Now reported on CNET News
Media giant Time Warner is backing away from the sale of its online division AOL, in favour of a tie-up with Microsoft to boost advertising revenue at the unit.Time Warner had been in talks with Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Comcast earlier this year about selling a stake in AOL, the second-most visited website in the US, behind Yahoo!.
If the deal went ahead, AOL would stop using Google as its primary internet search provider in favour of Microsoft’s MSN.
Yesterday, Sun announced the availability of their new CoolThreads powered servers. They’re powered by the latest incarnation of the UltraSPARC range of processors - so naturally, you get all the full binary compatibility assurances that brings. Sun are making much of the efficiency and “greenness” of these new boxes; but while I’m all for saving penguins and polar bears, what really stands out is the sheer performance these boxes bring. Check out the entry-level T1000 , for instance. £2,200 (list price according to the Sun UK catalogue) gets you a 6-core system, which can run 4 threads per core, making a total of 24 simultaneous threads.
This thing will absolutely make mincemeat of serving web pages, or pretty much anything else you can throw at it. According to their benchmarks using the industry standard SPECweb range of tests, The single CPU 1 GHz 8-core T1000 system was over two times as fast as a Dell system with dual 3.8 GHz Xeons. Read that again - a single processor clocked at nearly one fourth of the clock speed of a single Xeon beat a dual-Xeon system, and also soundly thrashed a IBM x346 with 2 dual-core processors. That is, by any metric, a stunning display of performance. And it only takes up 1-U of rack space.
Or, there’s the T2000 - which at £8,400 for a 8*4 core (32 simultaneous threads!), 8Gbs of RAM, Quad Gig-E, dual 10K RPM disks, PCI-X and a funky brushed metal case, stacks up very favourably against a similarly spec’d dual-processor UltraSparc IIIi V240 - at only a grand more. Interestingly, UltraSPARC IIIi based kit has just taken a drop in price!
Whilst the AMD kit Sun have been pushing out represents fantastic value for money and great flexibility (one platform, multiple OS’s - even Windows, if you so desired), this is the first time in a long while I’ve been excited at the launch of a new SPARC server. These things will collectively own the datacentre. It’s a 64-bit SPARC processor, running Solaris - so there’s no changes, no recompiling - just suddenly your applications will start to fly, and there’s none of the costs involved in jumping to a different architecture. Can’t wait to have a play on one of these…
Paul Lomax is Head of New Media for the Guardian Media Group's Regional Division and divides his time between London and Manchester in the UK. He's a former entrepreneur, a technologist and an experienced general manager and has been a digital professional for well over ten years.
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