Presidential candidate website tech, compared | Hacker News Reader

Presidential candidate website tech, compared

paulschreiber.com

95 pointsleahculver53 comments

I used to work in support at Rackspace and was fortunate enough to work on 2 presidential candidates and be the lead tech on another. I learned a ton.

The way they raise funds and advance through primaries made scaling out the infrastructure pretty interesting. It was basically, "If we make it through X with a big enough lead deploy gear by next Tuesday if not wait". Would have been a lot easier now that using "the cloud" is an option.

I ran those sites through the Sitetruth.com business legitimacy checker. The results are amusing.

hillaryclinton.com - no street address on web site. SSL cert is domain control only validated. Known to Open Directory, so it gets a medium rating of a yellow circle.

tedcruz.org - the robots.txt file redirects to the robots.txt file at "www.tedcruz.org". We interpret this as "robots go away", which is perhaps too strict. The SSL cert is domain control only validated. The site is known to Open Directory as non-commercial, so it gets the grey non-commercial neutral rating.

marcorubio.com - the robots.txt file redirects to the main page, which was interpreted as "robots go away". The SSL cert is one of the low-end Cloudflare certs with a long list of unrelated domains, so that's useless. Known to Open Directory from an old Senate campaign, and Open Directory says it's non-commercial, so it gets the grey non-commercial neutral rating.

randpaul.com - no street address on web site. SSL cert is domain control only validated. Not in Open Directory. No way to validate site ownership, so it gets the red do-not-enter symbol.

Paul's US Senate site, "www.paul.senate.gov", is much better. The U.S. Senate has a good Organization Validated SSL cert with full address info. (Our address parser couldn't parse "The Capitol" as a street address, so there's no map.) Amusingly, the SSL cert covers the sites of a number of senators of both parties. That site gets a green checkmark.

There's also "jebbushforpresident.com" and "jebbushforpresident.net". Both are bogus sites, not from the candidate. No street address, bad SSL certs, not in Open Directory. They get red "do not enter" symbols.

Not one of the candidate sites has a street address, or an SSL cert better than the low end "domain control only" validated certs. None of them except the U.S. Senate site match anything in our business directories, but one would not expect that for sites like these. The SiteTruth engine did properly identify the fake Jeb Bush sites as less than legitimate.

Moderately related (in an "it amused me" way): The back of the building Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters is in faces a Clinton St.: https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/584004566041112576

Have you thought about adding fields for design/consulting firm and CRM? Looks like Hillary is on Salesforce and Cruz is using (and probably overpaying) for Marketo.

The consultants are almost more interesting if you know the industry though. It looks like all the candidates built their sites internally, except for Rubio who is using Push Digital. Will be interesting to see which strategy works better.

FWIW, Dems seem to be outsourcing their digital needs more than Republicans. Looks like Bernie Sanders is with Wide Eye Creative and Martin O'Malley is with Blue State Digital. Potentially because there are many, many more successful Dem web firms (including one I work for lol) than there are Republican counter parts... Not sure though, just an interesting data point.

Which firms are your Republican counterparts?

Because the Dems have been so much "better" or at least more advanced than Republican for as long as anyone can remember the entire Democratic infrastructure is so much more built up than the Republican. Good and bad at the same time though. There are a lot of really good Democratic firms and freelancers but there are also a few really good Republican firms and a lot of not so good one.

For example the Democratic field has some really great players in it like Bully Pulpit Interactive, Blue State Digital, NGP VAN, Wide Eye Creative, Target Smart etc... The Republican field has less but still some good ones like i360, Targeted Victory, Push Digital, NationBuilder, etc.

tl;dr - D's have more and historically better firms. R's have less total firms but this cycle we could maybe see them on an equal (possibly better? probably not, but possible) level as D's.

Any idea what agency Clinton used to have the announcement video made? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uY7gLZDmn4 ). Any idea on how much such a thing costs?

I would assume they made the video internally, but I have no idea. If a firm did it then they'll probably be locked up with a lot of Hillary work this cycle so they don't need to promote themselves.

Those types of videos aren't cheap by any means. That being said I think it was done really well -- especially in comparison to announcement videos like Rubio's[0], which is a mess of random clips pasted together.

[0] https://marcorubio.com/landing/stream/

> I would assume they made the video internally, but I have no idea.

It would seem to be too good to have been made internally.

> Those types of videos aren't cheap by any means.

I'm still very curious to get an exact amount. Let's say the Hillary video... what, $200k? Maybe a lot of agencies will be unwilling to create a single video, in light of the argument that any campaign video has to fit in a bigger strategy... and the agency would rather work toward a bigger, cohesive strategic campaign which goes in millions amount?

EDIT: I was half right. They're using Hardpin Media[0][1]

[0] http://www.hardpinmedia.com/

[1] http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presid...

I think it's a stretch to assume that the way a presidential candidate's campaign webmaster chooses to configure a website will be any indication of how the candidate would lead the executive branch of government. It's probably better to look at the candidate's previous leadership performance and his or her positions (as indicated by voting records, not campaign rhetoric) on policy issues.

I read the article as exactly that, manufacturing a reason why you'd be interested in the comparison, other than just curiosity.

I didn't read the author's suggestion as serious.

This is probably a relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/932/

Campaign websites, especially at this point in the race, are as cheap and fast and possible. The tech that will win a presidency will be almost entirely behind the scenes--data collection, email segmenting, volunteer coordinating, etc.

Google Pagespeed: hillaryclinton.com 52 (Desktop) / 41 (Mobile) tedcruz.org 69 / 52 randpaul.com 59 / 44 marcorubio.com 76 / 51

Presidential campaigns have most definitely gone very high-tech. The Obama campaign was run by some really smart guys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Reed) using lots of services on AWS. Check out their infrastructure diagram (heads-up its 60MB).

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14405212/AWSOFA-Print-27...

Finally, here is a great tech talk video by the Obama for America tech team lead by CTO Harper Reed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg

Ah, AWS/the cloud makes a lot of sense for a campaign. Of limited duration, and the more successful, the more it'll have bursts of traffic tied to events.

hillaryclinton.com: Mail server: Gmail

Ironic given she's such an expert on running her own mail server...

CloudFlare 3 - Fast.ly 1

PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(

GoDaddy 2 :-((

(well, I guess you can tell what PL I prefer)

    > PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(

Didn't expect that, but not surprised either.

hillaryclinton.com has some sweet ASCII art when you open up the console. A fun little easter egg.

3 out of 4 candidate website do not support winxp. Wonder if this finally means that winxp compatibility is no longer worth the extra trouble from a business perspective.

What do you mean by "support winxp"? Websites are pretty OS agnostic. Do you mean they aren't compatible with IE6? Can't really test it currently, but I can't imagine these sites would work in the latest Firefox on Win8, but not on the latest Firefox on XP.

Windows XP doesn't support SNI, which means browsers that depend on the OS for SSL/TLS can't handle those sites.

I read that line as the opposite, that only Marco Rubio's site requires SNI support to access (hence the red checkmark on his, and the green Xs on the others, suggesting that requiring SNI is bad). Although I admit that line confused me at first.

The footnote is also suggestive that this is the correct interpretation.

You are 100% right. That suddenly make me dislike this list quite a lot, as it suggest that it is a technical achievement to not use SNI. I have seen several times how SNI has been the primary reason for not supporting https, as winxp support was seen as more important.

I can't agree more. With IPv4 space so diminished, avoiding SNI to support legacy clients at this point almost seems insane. Suggesting SNI, if required, is somehow bad just illustrates IMO that the list was constructed to make a political point.

I have no idea how to read the table on that site.

What is the difference between a red check mark and a green check mark?

What is the difference between a red X and a green X?

Green check mark means its presence is good (i.e. HTTPS support). Red X means its absence is bad

Footnote [2] explains SNI support (where the red check mark is “bad.”)

This reminds when the Joe Lieberman campaign said their site was hacked when it was really just cheap setup.

http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/finding-liebe...

I am surprised that only hillaryclinton.com has public whois data. IMHO, hidding behind a proxy is not a good cue for trust. Three among four are very slow to load on my PC. I think this very good article should also compare the performances of the websites.

Whois data is more used by spammers than anyone else. It's not like the other sites are purposefully trying to hide their contact information—if they want donations, they'll make sure to prominently display a mailing address.

Hillary also uses Webfonts by Hoefler, Modernizr, jQuery, Google Analytics, Font Awesome and possible a heavily modified version of Bootstrap.

I'd love to see a comparison of front end tech and general quality of their html/css/js.

This chart might be incorrect for https://www.hillaryclinton.com, BuiltWith shows it is using:

- Microsoft IIS 8 for a server

- ASP.NET

https://builtwith.com/hillaryclinton.com

No mention of python.

Moreover, I'm very curious to know how one even finds out such things (whether they're running on some python framework or ISP.net, etc.). I'm thinking a basic nmap scan can tell what server they're using (actually I'll try that out right now and report results in a few)

BuiltWith has cached results. Try

curl -I https://www.hillaryclinton.com/

curl -I https://www.hillaryclinton.com/api/oauth/token

Varnish in front of S3 and Tornado.

Built with seems wrong, look at the server headers:

Requesting https://hillaryclinton.com

SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Content-Length: 154 Content-Type: text/html Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:07:59 GMT Location: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/ Server: nginx Connection: keep-alive Redirecting to: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/

SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:08:00 GMT Server: AmazonS3 x-amz-id-2: I7+Tzq0w7Vw6347QHmyedJZfIdyiX4nPiHvXxJw/sD89ltjuop0YG1LgCkf2fo3s x-amz-request-id: 49406508AC541A03 Cache-Control: max-age=86400 Last-Modified: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 16:36:32 GMT ETag: "112d7310ce2add1d77ec28c6ce824fe5" Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 26723 Accept-Ranges: bytes X-Varnish: 3579276881 3567651786 Via: 1.1 varnish Age: 1837

It's bemusing that we are to assume this is the USA presidential candidate - neither of the strings 'usa' or 'america' appear on the page. Other countires that have presidents presumably need to identify themselves so as to not confuse (other) people.

Wait, you mean there are other countries than just the US of A?

"The Royal Family" gets similar treatment. I suspect that it's a language thing---there are only two Anglosphere countries with presidents, and the other one (Ireland) has ~1/50th the population of the US and lots of Irish speakers, so if you see an English language post about "the President", then there's a good chance that it's referring to the US one. I'd like to see speakers of other languages (or Anglophones from outside the Anglosphere) confirm or refute this hunch.

In Germany elections don't rely that heavily on the candidates so it is hard to say. But generally speaking there is no clear identification as well, (except for the fact that the address ends on ".de")

Sorry, I just accidentally downvoted you. I meant to upvote.

Why are they using Privacy/Proxy domain registration services?

All but Marco Rubio have wildcard certificates without an apparent use for them. It looks like whoever built their websites was keen on using all the budget they were alloted.

Who cares, their budget is in the millions. Better to spend the extra couple hundred bucks, and have it. They will most certainly need it (ex. donate.hillaryclinton.com, debates.hillaryclinton.com, vote.hillaryclinton.com).

The pervasive mindset is that mailings, tv/radio ad spots, and other traditional media platforms have a known and predictable return on investment. Using the web for organizing and fundraising is the new kid on the block. Despite the impressive showing in 2008 and 2012 on the Obama campaign its not a known/repeatable representative showing.

Every dollar spent on your web presence needs to return 5$ or more to funnel into these more stable predictable forms of outreach. Its not enough to be self sustaining or slightly profitable.

Nice username.

Nice blogpost :-)

Not all of their budget or they'd have EV certs

How does one achieve origin ip unknown?

CDN origins usually aren't public. I found the Ted Cruz one by checking the DNS history.

Ah, but their sites are using encryption. What's more important is what they think about everyone else using encryption - and whether they should be using "golden split key front doors" or not. Do a chart for that next.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com