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.

Apple today launched several product refreshes, but the one that really catches my eye is the Mac mini server. It’s pretty much just a Mac mini with the optical drive replaced with a second SATA 2.5″ hard drive and a copy of Snow Leopard server in place of the standard Mac OS X.

The hardware is pretty uneventful. People have been swapping drives in the Mac mini for years to add more storage as well as external drives. Software wise people have been using server products on the mini for some time. Nothing here is revolutionary. But marketing the product as a server is for a few reasons:

Home/Small Business Servers

Like I said, I’ve had a home server for years. It’s great for backing up and sharing files and printers. It can also be purposed for a myriad of other tasks. While you can set this all up on stock Mac OS X, tweaking it all is a little daunting as the Mac OS X UI only exposes the very basics. Mac OS X server has much deeper integration making it easier for people who don’t know what they are doing. I expect we’ll see some third party products that further expand the use of this in the home and small business market. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see some Home theater PC (HTPC) backend solutions. (MythTV anyone?)

Efficient Servers

The Mac Mini only consumes 16 watts when idle. It’s still a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz CPU, and ships with 4 GB RAM. The place it suffers is disk I/O thanks to using 5400 RPM drives (It’s cost per GB isn’t that great either thanks to the 2.5″ drives). In previous models it wasn’t too difficult to swap the drive with 7200 RPM drives though I don’t know how the thermals will play out with dual HD’s. It may be possible to use software RAID, I’m not sure what sort of improvement in performance you could get since I don’t know the details of the motherboard. However, if you have a task that’s not IO bound, or you use a NAS via Gigabit Ethernet (or a Firewire/USB drive) it may not matter. That’s a pretty affordable low powered node in your grid. Even better if it could handle higher density RAM to get 8 GB into there via 2 x 4GB SO-DIMMs.

I presume Apple’s Xgrid will work too.

It’s an interesting move, and one that I think could be successful.

Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden. And the amount of energy required is growing, says Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.

To put that in a little more perspective, the 2009 census for Sweden puts the population at 9,263,872. Sweden’s population is just slightly higher than New York City (8,274,527 in 2007) or the state of New Jersey (8,682,661 estimate in 2008). Granted Sweden’s population density is 20.6/km² compared to New York City’s 10,482/km² or New Jersey’s 438/km². Population density is important since that says a lot about energy consumption. Dense populations require less energy thanks to communal resources. I still suspect the average Swede uses less electricity than the average American anyway. All these numbers were pulled from Wikipedia.

The US Department of Energy does have data on power consumption and capacity as well as forecasts on consumption and production. The obvious downside in the data is the reliance on coal, oil and gas which have environmental impacts as well as political impacts and costs (we know about the instabilities of the oil market). This is why companies with lots of servers like Google are looking very carefully at power generation alternatives such as hydroelectric and solar.

We all benefit from data center efficiency. Lower cost computing is a big advantage to startups and encourages more innovation by removing price barriers. It’s also an advantage to the general public since the technology and tricks learned eventually trickle down to consumers. We already are seeing more efficient power supplies, some even beating the original 80 PLUS certification.

Perhaps if we started tracking “performance per watt” in addition to “watts per square foot” we’d be looking at things from a more sustainable perspective.

Data center capacity and consumption is pretty interesting when you look at all the variables involved. Growth, power costs, facility size, technology available, even foreign politics play a role in what it costs to operate.

Custom Servers

It has been known for years that Google has been building it’s own servers rather than buy from a vendor. They have defended this as their servers are more efficient and customized for their needs than they could ever buy. They cut out things like a video card which do nothing but add a point of failure and waste power. They put a battery on the server itself rather than have a UPS for the rack they found it to be more cheaper and more efficient. They also hang the power supply away from the rest of the system itself, presumably for cooling. This actually isn’t shocking since it’s been leaked several times before, though this is the first time that I’m aware of Google speaking publicly about their design in this much detail.

Container Data Centers

Apparently since 2005 Google has been using shipping containers as data centers. It’s been known for a long time Google was interested in the idea (as were other companies) but a first that they have actually been using them for a while. 1,160 servers per container utilizing 250 kilowatts of power = 780 watts per square foot. Very impressive.

I guess it’s only a matter of time before we see commercial servers, and perhaps even some desktops with power supplies that have their own batteries.

Update [4/11/2009 @ 5:00 PM EST]: Google has a blog post up including video of the summit.

Buying JungleDisk makes sense since Rackspace wants to get into the cloud storage business. JungleDisk is one of the bigger Amazon S3 products out there. By adding Rackspace support to the product they can quickly attempt to get into that market. If they will succeed depends on their offering’s cost. Their press release suggests $0.15/GB, but that doesn’t say if they will bill based on requests and bandwidth (which is where Amazon S3 gets expensive). Also interesting is this little nugget:

Also later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to allow developers to easily distribute content to millions of end users around the world and bring scalable content delivery and application acceleration services to the masses.

This is competing with Amazon’s attempts at starting a CDN later this year. It’s worth noting that these are both pretty primitive CDN’s since they require you to register objects before the CDN hosts them. Modern CDN’s like Limelight and Akamai allow you setup a CNAME so that their CDN essentially acts as a middle layer between your origin servers and your users. This requires no preregistering since the CDN can just check the origin for any asset requested. Caching is configured via configuration files and via standard http headers. I’m not sure how useful these CDN’s will be to most. Registering objects and uploading to another platform is a giant pain as opposed to just setting up a transparent CNAME. The difference is one requires development time, the other doesn’t.

Acquiring Slicehost makes sense since they apparently have technology that will be useful to Rackspace. They are making a bet that startups in need of hosting on virtual machines (which is much more complicated to manage than typical shared hosting) will produce a decent market in the future. With the economic downturn, at least in the short term this may not look like the most useful purchase. In the long run this may pay off handsomely. They have decent competition in that space and it’s quickly growing. Rackspace’s size may help it weather a downturn better than others though.

They closed 5.18 +0.22 (4.44%) today, despite the DOW being -514.45, so I guess I’m not alone in my assessment.

It seems the primary nameserver did not bump the SOA when it updated. As a result one of the other DNS servers was out of sync. Why only one? I doubt I’ll ever discover why.

Anyway, it seems to be fixed. If anyone notices an issue, let me know.

Edit: All done. Successfully moved to it’s new home.

As a result, if this site (and it’s feed) seems slower than normal, that’s the reason.