Comments on: The new whitehouse is so open it wants Robots to come in too

By: majic3

majic3 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:50:24 +0000

@Dion – so jquery has been part of whitehouse.gov since Obama? I thought it was very fresh the other day – more than just image changes. I saw it listed on css beauty. Obama seems real keen on making productive changes small & large :)

@patitdude – Obama’s changed site get fin yslow – but what did Bush’s get?

@RStankov – thats extremely funny

By: RStankov

RStankov — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:06:54 +0000

I’m little embarrassed but this is from the official site of Bulgarian government (witch, as it looks won’t be a government soon) – http://www.government.bg/robots.txt

By: bige

bige — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:12:45 +0000

Excellent point Ken. Also, “Bush” could have put in some honeypot urls in the robots.txt to track hack attempts. But since “Obama” doesn’t have any honeypot urls, then “Obama” must obviously be a better President for being more “transparent” to citizens and hackers alike. But hey, it’s just day 3.

By: KenAuenson

KenAuenson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:04:27 +0000

I am getting really tired of seeing this posted all over the internet.
If you were to actually look through the old robots.txt it clearly shows that they were attempting to prevent the text only “print” versions of most of the pages from being crawled. This was likely an attempt to keep 2 versions of the same information in the search results and to make a better experience for visitors from search engines.

By: patitdude

patitdude — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:25:07 +0000

The website got a “51″ and lots of F’s from YSlow. It seems like Obama MUST CHANGE…

By: patrickm

patrickm — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:50:11 +0000

whitehouse.gov Website Code Review here:
http://dotnetperls.com/Content/whitehouse-gov-Site.aspx

By: fastspottim

fastspottim — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:08:22 +0000

Wow. Ajaxian was the last site I expected there to be partisan politics in, hah. I highly doubt President Bush told the whitehouse.gov webmaster that he didn’t want Google crawling their site. It was probably just a really dumb webmaster.

One thing strange about the new whitehouse.gov is the terrible quality of the homepage jpg features. Other than that, it looks pretty nice.

By: phiggins

phiggins — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:02:24 +0000

Unfortunately, saying they want to be accessible doesn’t earn them enough extra credit to pass 508 requirements.
.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/
http://www.section508.gov/
.
Try tabbing through links, turning on high contrast, or using a screen reader to navigate the site. Site is pretty, yes, but not a very good user experience for those with disabilities, or even perfectly capable people like myself that like knowing where browser focus is.
.
For accessibility to be a part of the platform overall, this is disappointing.

By: JonBad

JonBad — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:03:16 +0000

Are you sure it is the same development team? The White House site uses ASP.NET and the change site does not. From my experience developers don’t tend to jump between server-side technologies that much. Especially in the direction of ASP.NET.

By: ibolmo

ibolmo — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:24:09 +0000

Haha Dion. You crack me up. :)