Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A Cursory Glance at the New Whitehouse.gov

Being a web guy it is my unofficial duty to snoop around the new Whitehouse.gov site to see what info I can gather.

A simple peak at the HTTP headers reveals the following
- Webtrends
- Asp.NET Version 2.0.50727, Microsoft-IIS/6.0

Yuck and yucker? I've only heard bad things about Webtrends, but maybe the WH had an existing contract. As for Asp.net, pretty surprising given that barackobama.com was in Php.

Browsing the html and js I see properly indented tags and only moderately well-named css class names. Div-based layout is definitely everywhere, but that's pretty much a common expectation these days.

A major plus goes to the team for using JQuery and a bunch of plugins, such as Carousel, Cycle, and Galleria. They also do a bunch of custom stuff in their plugins file which I don't have time to fully grok.

A major minus goes to their email validation. I tried to sign up my email for email updates, but it looks like their email box isn't accepting RFC2822 valid emails, failing on a + character in the local-part. The casing of the validation function makes me thing it's a stock Aspx validation rejecting the format. Boo++!

Other than that, interesting overall to see my new government get all high tech. I expect great things from whitehouse.gov in the future :)