When you see a large get it’s not terribly hard to appreciate it’s size. It’s not that hard to appreciate the amount of power needed to get it airborne. If you need a reminder, stand behind one that’s taking off.

It’s pretty easy however to overlook the amount of time/effort that goes into the giant task of painting an airplane. This several minute time lapse is pretty eye opening. It takes a long time and many people to paint even the most “simple” livery onto a plane. And that particular aircraft has had at least 3 distinct paint jobs, perhaps more since it’s over 20 years old.

Some awesome video shot via Helmet Camera. P-40K, the FG-1D and the P-51D. I’d recommend watching full screen and 720p.

[Via: Gizmodo]

Amazing cover of The Simpsons theme song. This must have taken a lot of planning to break this all out.

I can’t even begin to contemplate how many man hours went into this. He also released the unprocessed vocals. It’s always interesting to compare what someone sounds like before the technology takes over. Especially today. If you’re curious about the equipment, he’s got some info on his website.

Awesome little video of various things exploding in a microwave. I’ve always wanted to try the Ivory Soap one. Ivory allegedly has little air bubbles, which when in the microwave heat up causing the moisture to turn to gas. That causes it to expand and appear like a foam.

I’m speechless. Sounds like we’ll learn more during the Superbowl.

Update: It’s for a Honda Ad.

This was made by Jim Henson for Bell System in 1963. The video notes:

It also may be the same robot that appeared on the Mike Douglas Show in 1966. Henson created a different — but similar — robot for the SKF Industries pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair.

So essentially Elmo’s great grandfather is this Steampunk robot.

Click on the image to get a full one mirrored here, the original can be found here.

The Blanks are best known as “Ted’s Band” on the TV show Scrubs. They are in fact a real life a cappella group. The above adaptation of Hey Ya! (originally by Outkast) was partially used in an episode at one point. It reminds me of this Mat Weddle of Obadiah Parker cover.

Related is The Blanks doing a cover of Superman (the Scrubs theme song).

I might like musical parodies a bit.

My observations/conclusions/insights (if you can call it that) can be found after the raw data.

Backend

Frontend

Frontend (cont)

Observations

I retooled this for 2012 based on how web development and the internet has changed as well as the data that’s available. The most noteworthy thing is that EVERY campaign uses open source. Perhaps it’s saving money in this economy? Windows Server isn’t free after all. Most use it extensively. Regardless who wins, that candidate would be very hypocritical to support the (unlikely regardless) “open source is communism” mantra. If this isn’t proof that open source is as mainstream as ever in America, I don’t know what is. Apache is a huge winner. So is jQuery, WordPress, Drupal, even Nginx and Varnish made a showing (they weren’t even on the radar in 2008).

Lots of websites are using the HTML5 doctype now. That doesn’t mean they are using HTML5, but many are moving in that direction. Web Fonts were spotted. Tables were very rare.

Shockingly, CDN usage and HTTP compression were pretty rare. Given Google will host popular javascript frameworks (jQuery for example), if you can’t afford the CPU to gzip data you could let Google host it for free. Lots of cloud hosting though.

Between popular CMS’s, and popular plugins/modules for those CMS’s, there’s little diversity in these sites this time around. It was obvious last time, it’s much more obvious this time. Mono-culture has set in regarding the technicals of these sites.

One thing that really stood out is the amount of analytics on each site. This election is really a data war. Knowing as much as possible about voters and the candidates base. Clearly this is an escalation from 2008. There is also a proliferation of real-time analytics usage this time around. Data is everything in the business world, it’s becoming that way in campaign websites as well.

Misc Notes

Data collection method: The data for this blog post was mostly done on the evening of August 30, 2011 and August 31, 2011 by myself. The character set was however Firefox 6.0 interprets the page. HTML validation was checked by submitting to the W3C validator. All other analysis was done by eye and using tools like cURL. Some things were a little bit of a judgment call, such as CSS layout. I didn’t generally penalize if a table was used, it depends how it was used, and the context. I viewed source on all of them, and spent some time looking around while collecting data. I didn’t view every page on every site, since that would drive me insane. The data is based on the homepage of the site however I did make a brief attempt to hunt for feeds since some only include a link on a “news” page. If I couldn’t find it quick enough, it doesn’t exist.

Secrets In Websites III?: Yes there will likely be a third installment. I don’t know when, I don’t know what will be included. I do have some ideas and notes. It takes time to put these together, and I’m not exactly drowning in free time these days.

* Roy Moore’s website is Flash in an iframe. For purposes of this analysis I’m using the page containing the flash object.