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.

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.

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.