Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/whitehousegov-has-a-new-face/

by transburgh • 18 years ago

63 46 18 years ago

josefresco• 18 years ago

I want to know who did the new design/site work?

showerst2• 18 years ago

I don't have any idea, but Blue State Digital did his campaign site and a bunch of other dem 08 work, so perhaps it was them.

tptacek• 18 years ago

Blue State Digital built CHANGE.GOV, and this is pretty clearly a continuation, although the impression I get is that they've brought a lot of it in-house.

smhinsey• 18 years ago

I thought BSD was a shoe-in for this as well, but if you view source you'll see the hallmarks of ASP.NET (viewstate and control naming), which throws me.

transburgh• 18 years ago

I don't know what to think that the site has a blog.

redorb• 18 years ago

doesn't have comments (to avoid trolls and spam) - and its basically a "hip" way of saying a press release in a conversational tone. I think its ok.

trickjarrett2• 18 years ago

It's also built using jQuery as tweeted by jResig. I was hoping Obama would begin using twitter immediately after taking the Presidency. We'll see if the twitter account falls into the history books and is not utilized.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

I think I'm prepared to forgive the President for not having the time to post on Twitter.

trickjarrett2• 18 years ago

Oh I'm not going to think less of him should the account not be used again.

henning• 18 years ago

What? No. He has to spend 15 hours a day checking email and tweeting like Gary Vaynerchuk says! Social media!!

steveplace• 18 years ago

according to @sacca he'll get back on. And by him I mean his PR machine.

nirmal• 18 years ago

Who's going to add the Whitehouse blog to their feedreader?

brandonkm• 18 years ago

I'm sure a ton of people will. In fact, I would bet that the whitehouse blog may introduce lots of people to RSS for the first time ever. The concept of a more transparent government where citizens are informed about the happenings inside the white house will be heavily at play here.

blogimus• 18 years ago

Whitehouse.gov also has a new robots.txt file ( http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt )

If you search google for 'whitehouse' and 'robots' then you can still see the cache of the robots.txt file of the Bush Administration (http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:tCfemw3M-aUJ:www.whiteho...)

jhancock• 18 years ago

God Bless!!! A geek's definition of Freedom!!! What a diff.

vaksel• 18 years ago

good catch

keyes• 18 years ago

All the URLs in the former robots.txt seem to end in "/text". It's likely that they just didn't want the text versions of the articles to be indexed.

jonknee2• 18 years ago

You are correct. The text versions were present for screen readers.

look_lookatme• 18 years ago

The site has been operational for less than a day. Let's compare at the end of administration.

sh1mmer5• 18 years ago

Cache seems to have been updated now. Anyone have the contents to repost or another cache?

sh1mmer5• 18 years ago

Yahoo has a cache :)

http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=site%3Awhite...

showerst2• 18 years ago

The main big block of text next to the picture is a jpg, and looks like it has a ton of compression artifacts. tsk tsk! =)

Other than that it's an awesome site, definitely the best government agency site I've ever seen.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

Those aren't compress... wait.. yessss that's exactly what they are. Compression artifacts. Move along. You didn't see nuthin'.

bgutierrez• 18 years ago

Even better, it's valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehous...

axod• 18 years ago

//<![CDATA[ Why is this good? & why is it better than HTML4.01 Strict? XHTML is not beautiful. //]]>

teej• 18 years ago

XHTML is also pointless when it's served up at text/html

evdawg• 18 years ago

Who cares if it validates? The underlying markup is pretty unsemantic.

Just because it validates doesn't mean it's a well-coded website.

DTrejo• 18 years ago

It seems pretty slow - I guess that's a good sign (many people looking at it?)

jrnkntl• 18 years ago

But why are they using some external commercial company for visitor analytics? (webtrendslive.com)

ALee• 18 years ago

probably because of government contract, but also because in the DC region WebTrends is well-known as an analytics tool

TweedHeads2• 18 years ago

And so does http://whitehouse.net

TweedHeads2• 18 years ago

Screenshot

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7974/chinahousehd8.png

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

The President of the United States now has a blog.

Unbelievable only a year ago, really.

froo• 18 years ago

Yes, but one must wonder if he uses "The Google"

callahad2• 18 years ago

Check out http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/

"Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License."

danielrhodes• 18 years ago

This doesn't mean much. I believe all works produced by the federal government are in the public domain and you don't need permission to reproduce them.

callahad2• 18 years ago

True, and covered in the first of the three paragraphs at that link:

"Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."

The news is that they're defaulting to Creative Commons for all "third-party content" on the site, including user submissions. That's the part that got me. Even if they're not producing it, they're trying to keep information open (as opposed to just requiring copyright assignment, for instance)

cmos• 18 years ago

ok, am I the only fool who got a bit teary eyed when going through whitehouse.gov? Whether you agree with his politics or not, you have to admit that he is going to change the way we interact with our government.

"President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause"

Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face

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