Categories
Mozilla Open Source Politics

WhiteHouse.gov Goes Open Source

I noted in January that WhiteHouse.gov relaunched for the Obama administration using a closed source infrastructure (it was using ASP.NET on IIS 6.0) running a proprietary CMS.

It has now relaunched using open source Drupal. Also interesting is that it’s no longer broadcasting any headers regarding it’s server. Considering Drupal is by far better tested on a Unix OS andApache, I’m wondering if they dropped Windows Server/IIS 6.0 in favor of some sort of Linux and Apache. I can’t find any hint at what they are using.

It’s noteworthy that Drupal was already used on recovery.gov and has been used in politics by way of CivicSpace for the Dean campaign in 2004.

Via Drupal it’s still using jQuery (verison 1.2.6). It’s also now using RSS rather than ATOM for feeds, which I presume is by way of the switch to Drupal rather than an intentional effort.

Another interesting change is they tweaked the doctype from XHTML Transitional to XHTML+RDFa.

Pretty much everything else is still the same including the design. Analytics is still done using WebTrends (holdover from the Bush administration) and Akamai still sits in front of their servers.

For CSS hackers: They still choose conditional CSS for IE compatibility.

Their pages don’t fully validate anymore, though there is no terrible markup either.

Video is still done using Flash, maybe they’ll consider adopting HTML5 video. They could do so and fallback to Flash. The latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome could take advantage of it today. The rest of the browsers would get the Flash experience. That would be the next major step in opening up. Mark Pilgrim has a good primer if they need.

Edit [9/26/2009 @ 1:45 PM EST]: Tim O’Reilly confirms it is indeed running on LAMP, specifically Red Hat Linux with Apache, MySQL and obviously PHP. Apache Solr is used for search.

Categories
Personal

Worked way to late/early

Worked way to late last night… well early this morning. Started at 6:30… finished 4:00 (a few minutes early).

It was a bad experience, and I’m not thrilled. I’m quite tired, but that nap I took helped a ton. Will take another later so I can watch South park. Then to bed.

Still, a moment of downtime, so I’m working more on that CMS.

Yet another side note: For those that don’t know already, Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse is a godsend. Since I’ve been using it, nothing has gotten by so far.

I’m just waiting for perl based auto-updating of the master-blacklist. I don’t do Python here. I recommend it to all my blogging buddies. It’s a great product. And props to Jay for the release. He’s saved blogging.

Categories
MacVillage.net

Programming Butt Kicking

Sunday and Monday were great programming days. Got tons of bugs fixed on the MacVillage.net CMS. Started Indexing, that’s now done (partly). Also got some limited search functionality. And tons and tons of stupid bugs, and odd functionality fixed. More than I noted in my change log. A lot more. It was good time. Some code cleanup, removed some bogus code, and consolidated a few things…. all was good in happy town.

Then this Computer Science & Programming Lab came around. And I feel like I took a shower in a Turkish prison, and dropped the soap.

It hurts. I’m tired, and I want sleep. And I want a decent grade. And this internal conflict might be the war to end all wars.

Spam Filtering is starting now on my server, so my email should be cleaning on my server, rather than client side, meaning my CPU should be free a bit more. A great thing.

Categories
MacVillage.net

Content Management Systems are good

Yes they are. I finally have selected a free CMS that will be implemented across MacVillage.net for now (and eventually on all other “Sub sites” of Accettura Media. This is great news, since it now clears the way for finally redoing the design for something more standards compliant and browser friendly. Time to put the creative hat on now.