whitehouse.gov

Oops! New GOP leader's Web site points to a Dem

The Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives wasn't quite as successful online.

This evening, incoming House majority leader Eric Cantor's Web site began directing visitors to links at majorityleader.house.gov.

The problem? It's still owned and operated by Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democrat who has been House Majority leader since 2007 and has been using the Web site to denounce Republicans as recently as a few hours ago. Anyone clicking on Cantor's links got 404 errors instead of details he promised about congressional reforms (see related CNET story).

Cantor won't officially … Read more

WhiteHouse.gov now runs Drupal. What took it so long?

There's a lot of buzz today on the Obama Administration's decision to run WhiteHouse.gov on Drupal, the popular open-source Web publishing system. Given the U.S. federal government's widespread adoption of open source, however, the amazing thing is that it took so long.

After all, other areas of the U.S. federal government have been involved with open source for years. From the Department of Defense to the Small Business Administration to the OSHA, U.S. federal adoption of open source is remarkably strong.

It is now, anyway. This is a big shift in the federal … Read more

White House pulls e-mail for 'fishy' reports

On August 4, White House aide Macon Phillips announced the launch of flag@whitehouse.gov, which encouraged Americans to report "fishy" information related to the Obama health care proposal. Phillips' announcement was titled "Facts Are Stubborn Things."

Well, so is public opinion, as the White House acknowledged on Monday by quietly pulling the plug on the flag@whitehouse.gov e-mail address.

Messages sent there are now bounced back with this response:

<flag@whitehouse.gov>: host mailhub-wh2.whitehouse.gov[63.161.169.140] said: 550 5.2.1 <flag@whitehouse.gov>... The email … Read more

Obama's virtual town hall takes legalize-pot detour

As any major Web site can attest, any online voting begs to be influenced by special interests. CNBC yanked a 2007 presidential poll after enthusiastic Ron Paul supporters boosted their candidate to 75 percent, and the FreeRepublic.com crowd recently flooded a Web vote about stem cell funding.

On Thursday, WhiteHouse.gov became the latest Web site to experience this kind of deluge as part of an online town hall--and this time, it was marijuana legalization advocates who voted to push their questions to the top of the charts.

By the time President Obama's town hall began, questions about … Read more

The 404 263: Where Comic Sans is a poor excuse for a font

Comic Sans really is a terrible look for a font. It might've been cool to write an essay about Christopher Columbus in it in third grade, but now it makes you seem uneducated. Do like Obama and stick with Helvetica or Georgia. Anyway, on today's show we tackle the hard issues and correct a few mistakes, like coming down too hard on Obama for screwing up the Presidential Oath. Also, a rather large helping of Calls from the Public calling Wilson out on his b.s.--no surprise there! (Wilson's note: Just because Jeff and Justin don'… Read more

Much ado about Whitehouse.gov's new openness

Fans of President Barack Obama, or perhaps just those who dislike former President George W. Bush, seem to think there's something notable about the way the new White House Web site is configured to deal with search engines.

That configuration file is called robots.txt. It's designed to let Webmasters ask search engine robots not to include certain areas of a Web site in their index. Well-behaved robots will comply.

The Obama revamp of Whitehouse.gov included a shorter robots.txt file, which Thenextweb.com called "a sign of greater transparency and change." A BoingBoing poster … Read more

Obama's Whitehouse.gov launches, with problems

As President-elect Barack Obama began his inaugural address at noon on Tuesday, his aides were busy switching over Whitehouse.gov.

Until 11:59 am EST, the Web site featured a photograph of former president George W. Bush leaving the White House for the last time. The relaunched site's most prominent feature is an oversize photo of the new president next to the slogan: "Change has come to America."

Because the presidential Web site launched under Bill Clinton's tenure, this is only the second time that Whitehouse.gov has changed hands. The Clinton-Bush handover was not without … Read more