There is now a assign NASA to do a feasibility study and conceptual design of the Gen1 USS Enterprise interplanetary spaceship I’m all for a Manhattan project style roadmap, it pushes to do great things and changes the world and the nation for the better. I’m not convinced we have the technology or will in the near future for the propulsion system. I also suspect it’s size would make it difficult secure enough resources, the same problem with the death star proposal.
Tag: whitehouse
The internet has succeeded in getting 25,000 signatures in the petition to build a Death Star. By practice the White House must now respond to the petition. I am very much amused.
It’s worth noting some Debbie Downer figured out it would cost $852,000,000,000,000,000 in steel alone to build.
I for one look forward to the White House response. If the president were wise, he’d respond himself with a web video.
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
Whitehouse.gov Analysis
A few notes on the new whitehouse.gov website as I did for the campaign sites after about 5 minutes of sniffing around:
- Running Microsoft-IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.50727. The Bush administration ran Apache on what I think was some sort of Unix. Data is gzip’d.
- Whitehouse.gov is using Akamai as a CDN and for DNS service.
- Using jQuery 1.2.6 (someone should let them know 1.3 is out). Also using several plugins including jQuery UI, jcarousel, Thickbox. Also using swfobject.
- Pages tentatively validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I’m shocked by this. I’ve checked several pages all with the same result.
- Using WebTrends for analytics. Bush Administration also did.
- IE Conditional Stylesheets and a print stylesheet.
- RSS feeds are actually Atom feeds.
- The website is setting two cookies that I can see
WT_FPCandASP.NET_SessionIdwhich expire at the end of the session which is not prohibited in federal government as per OMB Guidance for Implementing the Privacy Provisions of the E-Government Act of 2002 (using Google Cache for that link since I can’t find it anywhere else, our government should really keep those in a more permanent location).
I should note that this is quite different in architecture than the Obama campaign site which ran PWS/PHP, no notable JS library, feed, and Google Analytics.
Update [1/20/2009 @ 9:00 PM EST]:
- Jason Kottke points out that the new whitehouse.gov sports a much slimmer robots.txt file.
- Content is now under Creative Commons license. Way to go Lawrence Lessig.