Comments on: Obama Renovates Whitehouse.gov

By: Marc Jones

Marc Jones — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:25:52 +0000

Any screen grabs of the previous incarnation?

Nice article. Thanks.

By: Addicott Web

Addicott Web — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:53:20 +0000

I wish I had thought to take a screen shot of the previous version, but fortunately someone else did, which was a really smart move. They took the screen shot yesterday morning right before the website was switched over to the new version, so you get a great idea of what the most recent version looked like. I downloaded the image to my server, and you can see it here; I found it on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/admorales/3212591263/.

By: Ezra

Ezra — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:39:43 +0000

What an upgrade – and a blog with rss! It’s nice to see the Obama team continue the reliance on the internet that carried them through the campaign. And he’s going to need all those email addresses in 4 years anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sends out occasional emails while in office much like he did during the campaign, so when he runs for reelection people won’t think “oh, he only writes to us directly when he wants our money.”

Another interesting thing I read, the old whitehouse.gov purposely had code in there to make sure it wasn’t crawled by search sites, and the new one removed all that. More here – http://www.kottke.org/09/01/the-countrys-new-robotstxt-file

By: Addicott Web

Addicott Web — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:09:17 +0000

It's funny you mentioned how he'll need all those e-mail addresses in 4 years when the next election comes around, because if you go to http://www.barackobama.com, it's still an active website and still being updated even. So it looks like they're definitely planning on keeping that around for the next go-round, which totally makes sense. That's a really interesting link about the robots.txt file from the old website - what a difference!