Presidential candidate website tech, compared
paulschreiber.com
Presidential candidate website tech, compared
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#2Ah, 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.
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#3CloudFlare 3 - Fast.ly 1
PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(
GoDaddy 2 :-((
(well, I guess you can tell what PL I prefer)
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#4Presidential 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.
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#5All 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.
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#6All 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).
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#7This 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...
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#8I 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.
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#9I 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.
Re: Presidential candidate website tech, compared
#10It'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.