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The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s central team of web developers has been talking about starting a blog for quite a while now. While our friends over in Radio Labs and Journalism Labs have been busily sharing the fruits of their hard work, it's all been a bit quiet over here. So, before we begin: a quick apology (sorry we're late), and a quick explanation.

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One of the reasons for the delay is that, despite the mention of a 'central team' about two sentences ago, there is no main set of people that builds bbc.co.uk. Instead, there's a teeming colony of developers and designers of all kinds, spread over a huge range of different projects. It turns out that arranging for a representative group of these people to write articles is a near-impossible task, so a few of us are just going to start writing about what we do, and hope for the best. As with most things in web development, if something needs to change along the way, we'll change it.

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The Internet Blog already exists, of course, and designers and developers often appear there to explain what they've been up to. Normally, though, it's a place for major announcements and discussion of the big issues. This new blog will be from people who spend their days up to their eyeballs in the nitty-gritty of building bbc.co.uk. It'll be less about the grand scheme of things, and more about the details of how things work - and often don't work - down on the front line. If the Internet Blog is the view from General Melchett, this is Blackadder. And, inevitably, Baldrick.

If all goes to plan, over the coming weeks you'll hear from a good selection of people. The person who builds the main page template of bbc.co.uk (which means chunks of his code have been rendered about 5000 times since you started reading this sentence) will, for example, be going into depth about how it all works. The people who build ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer will, amongst other things, explain some of the advanced techniques they've been experimenting with. The Jedi from the Glow team will tell us about the thinking that's going into future releases of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s open source library. And other developers from teams with exciting and top-secret names will write about their plans to introduce some completely new things to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Online.

As we go along, some posts will be about code, some will be about the code behind the code, and some will be trying to tie it all together into some kind of grand unifying theory of everything. If you're involved in the web, or are just curious about how things work behind the scenes on a website like this one, hopefully you'll find some good food for your feedreader.