Presidential candidate website tech, compared(paulschreiber.com) |
Presidential candidate website tech, compared(paulschreiber.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't read the author's suggestion as serious.
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.
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.
Ironic given she's such an expert on running her own mail server...
PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(
GoDaddy 2 :-((
(well, I guess you can tell what PL I prefer)
> PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(
The footnote is also suggestive that this is the correct interpretation.
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?
Footnote [2] explains SNI support (where the red check mark is “bad.”)
http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/finding-liebe...
- Microsoft IIS 8 for a server
- ASP.NET
https://builtwith.com/hillaryclinton.com
No mention of python.
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
curl -I https://www.hillaryclinton.com/
curl -I https://www.hillaryclinton.com/api/oauth/token
Varnish in front of S3 and Tornado.
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.
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.
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?
[0] http://www.hardpinmedia.com/
[1] http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presid...