Tim Retout's www presence

The Archers website

For those who are not aware, The Archers is a soap opera about rural life, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Its website has recently been revamped.

Unfortunately, I appear to be served the mobile version when I visit the front page (in all of Chromium, Iceweasel and Epiphany on Debian - admittedly not the most mainstream of browsers). BBC Mobile is doing some over-zealous useragent sniffing, it seems.

Also amusing: there's a "Who's Who" database of Archers characters, and several of them share the birthday "1st Jan 1970". There was I thinking that Harry Mason and Fallon Rogers had a 15 year age gap... but no.

This will be as a result of the underlying database storing values in Unix time, and having a default value of "0". An explanation of Unix time popped up in an episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage the other week, which was nice to hear.

Posted: 24 Nov 2010 19:48 | Tags: bbc, archers