BBC News feeds/ alerts

BBC news desktop alerts are really annoying me at the moment - mostly that the breaking news flash thing is always about 10 or 15 minutes late!

For instance they reported the story about the man being jailed for the sex attack on the girl about 15 minutes ago (at least because I didn't see their breaking news, just it in the headlines) and I've only just got it on BBC alerts.

Also I have very fast broadband and the other day I was browsing BBC online (what are the odds) and the internet was working fine but BBC Alerts just kept coming back to me saying I wasn't plugged into the internet - you would have thought that if the BBC is spending our TV liscence money on feeds and alerts they could at least make them work.

It depends how often the program checks the feed for new items. If there's an option, tell it to check at least every two minutes. If your version of the program isn't up to date, update it. And check the firewall is letting connections through to and from the program.

No option to do that, my firewall doesn't affect it because I've configured it to work and I updated it yesturday.

They have very little control over this - if I remember rightly it's just a branded Skinkers app, which probably just draws from the 'latest published stories' feed, which only updates annoyingly infrequently even if between polling another dozen stories have been added. I've tried to use this for breaking news shtuff in my screensavers of late, but it's a bit useless for that reason.

I may be very wrong, but doesn't it get its updates by polling this xml file rather than the latest published stories feed? It might be useful for your screensavers etc, too.

Sorry, you're absolutely right. I remember seeing that on the Backstage feeds list - unfortunately it's just a wee bit too discerning for my liking.