Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face | Hacker News Reader

Whitehouse.gov Has A New Face

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63 pointstransburgh46 comments

Whitehouse.gov also has a new robots.txt file ( http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt )

If you search google for 'whitehouse' and 'robots' then you can still see the cache of the robots.txt file of the Bush Administration (http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:tCfemw3M-aUJ:www.whiteho...)

God Bless!!! A geek's definition of Freedom!!! What a diff.

good catch

All the URLs in the former robots.txt seem to end in "/text". It's likely that they just didn't want the text versions of the articles to be indexed.

You are correct. The text versions were present for screen readers.

Instead of just using good markup in the first place?

Good markup can't handle it all, text-only mode allows for stuff like having a transcript instead of a video with a link to a transcript. Text-only mode is even available on the new site:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/

"In addition to the features that make the graphics version of the site more accessible, a text-only version provides added convenience for users."

I'm not sure how to access it though, maybe that feature hasn't launched yet.

I'm going to disagree. Let me share some background, I spent several years helping to write the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 spec. The original WCAG 1.0 as well as Section 508 specify an alternate text only site as a viable method.

Real world experience shows us those sites quickly fall behind. Text-alternatives are necessary for multimedia content, text-only sites as an alternative to good markup aren't.

Fall behind in what sense? Obviously, if the multimedia content isn't transcribed quickly enough, then that makes sense, but I would also guess less consequential than if a given page weren't transformed from 'marked up' to 'text', but in the latter case, if the backend is dynamic, and just changing the output format, why would it fall behind?

People just don't want to maintain 2 sites. Extra features and sections often don't get updated to the text only rendering.

I guess my point is that screen readers like (even prefer) well written markup. A text-only site is a kickback from when they couldn't and the accessibility guidelines were written to deal with that.

The site has been operational for less than a day. Let's compare at the end of administration.

Cache seems to have been updated now. Anyone have the contents to repost or another cache?

Yahoo has a cache :)

http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=site%3Awhite...

It's also built using jQuery as tweeted by jResig. I was hoping Obama would begin using twitter immediately after taking the Presidency. We'll see if the twitter account falls into the history books and is not utilized.

I think I'm prepared to forgive the President for not having the time to post on Twitter.

Oh I'm not going to think less of him should the account not be used again.

What? No. He has to spend 15 hours a day checking email and tweeting like Gary Vaynerchuk says! Social media!!

  dm @joeyb Bleh, this Gordon guy is boring me to tears. Your turn next time. Bar ltr?

according to @sacca he'll get back on. And by him I mean his PR machine.

Check out http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/

"Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License."

This doesn't mean much. I believe all works produced by the federal government are in the public domain and you don't need permission to reproduce them.

True, and covered in the first of the three paragraphs at that link:

"Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."

The news is that they're defaulting to Creative Commons for all "third-party content" on the site, including user submissions. That's the part that got me. Even if they're not producing it, they're trying to keep information open (as opposed to just requiring copyright assignment, for instance)

Even better, it's valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehous...

//<![CDATA[ Why is this good? & why is it better than HTML4.01 Strict? XHTML is not beautiful. //]]>

XHTML is also pointless when it's served up at text/html

Who cares if it validates? The underlying markup is pretty unsemantic.

Just because it validates doesn't mean it's a well-coded website.

The main big block of text next to the picture is a jpg, and looks like it has a ton of compression artifacts. tsk tsk! =)

Other than that it's an awesome site, definitely the best government agency site I've ever seen.

Those aren't compress... wait.. yessss that's exactly what they are. Compression artifacts. Move along. You didn't see nuthin'.

Who's going to add the Whitehouse blog to their feedreader?

I'm sure a ton of people will. In fact, I would bet that the whitehouse blog may introduce lots of people to RSS for the first time ever. The concept of a more transparent government where citizens are informed about the happenings inside the white house will be heavily at play here.

The President of the United States now has a blog.

Unbelievable only a year ago, really.

Yes, but one must wonder if he uses "The Google"

But why are they using some external commercial company for visitor analytics? (webtrendslive.com)

probably because of government contract, but also because in the DC region WebTrends is well-known as an analytics tool

I don't know what to think that the site has a blog.

doesn't have comments (to avoid trolls and spam) - and its basically a "hip" way of saying a press release in a conversational tone. I think its ok.

ok, am I the only fool who got a bit teary eyed when going through whitehouse.gov? Whether you agree with his politics or not, you have to admit that he is going to change the way we interact with our government.

"President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause"

I want to know who did the new design/site work?

I don't have any idea, but Blue State Digital did his campaign site and a bunch of other dem 08 work, so perhaps it was them.

Blue State Digital built CHANGE.GOV, and this is pretty clearly a continuation, although the impression I get is that they've brought a lot of it in-house.

Macon Phillips, who is listed on LinkedIn as a "Director of Strategy and Communications for Blue State Digital" is now the Director of New Media for the Executive Office of the President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse...

I thought BSD was a shoe-in for this as well, but if you view source you'll see the hallmarks of ASP.NET (viewstate and control naming), which throws me.

Yeah. BSD used their own CMS and ExpressionEngine I think. Kind of surprised that this is in ASP.NET. Wouldn't be surprised if it changes later on.

It seems pretty slow - I guess that's a good sign (many people looking at it?)

And so does http://whitehouse.net

Screenshot

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/7974/chinahousehd8.png

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