Presidential candidate website tech, compared

I used to work in support at Rackspace and was fortunate enough to work on 2 presidential candidates and be the lead tech on another. I learned a ton.<p>The way they raise funds and advance through primaries made scaling out the infrastructure pretty interesting. It was basically, &quot;If we make it through X with a big enough lead deploy gear by next Tuesday if not wait&quot;. Would have been a lot easier now that using &quot;the cloud&quot; is an option.

I ran those sites through the Sitetruth.com business legitimacy checker. The results are amusing.<p>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.<p>tedcruz.org - the robots.txt file redirects to the robots.txt file at &quot;www.tedcruz.org&quot;. We interpret this as &quot;robots go away&quot;, 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.<p>marcorubio.com - the robots.txt file redirects to the main page, which was interpreted as &quot;robots go away&quot;. The SSL cert is one of the low-end Cloudflare certs with a long list of unrelated domains, so that&#x27;s useless. Known to Open Directory from an old Senate campaign, and Open Directory says it&#x27;s non-commercial, so it gets the grey non-commercial neutral rating.<p>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.<p>Paul&#x27;s US Senate site, &quot;www.paul.senate.gov&quot;, is much better. The U.S. Senate has a good Organization Validated SSL cert with full address info. (Our address parser couldn&#x27;t parse &quot;The Capitol&quot; as a street address, so there&#x27;s no map.) Amusingly, the SSL cert covers the sites of a number of senators of both parties. That site gets a green checkmark.<p>There&#x27;s also &quot;jebbushforpresident.com&quot; and &quot;jebbushforpresident.net&quot;. Both are bogus sites, not from the candidate. No street address, bad SSL certs, not in Open Directory. They get red &quot;do not enter&quot; symbols.<p>Not one of the candidate sites has a street address, or an SSL cert better than the low end &quot;domain control only&quot; 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.

Have you thought about adding fields for design&#x2F;consulting firm and CRM? Looks like Hillary is on Salesforce and Cruz is using (and probably overpaying) for Marketo.<p>The consultants are almost more interesting if you know the industry though. It looks like all the candidates built their sites internally, except for Rubio who is using Push Digital. Will be interesting to see which strategy works better.

I think it&#x27;s a stretch to assume that the way a presidential candidate&#x27;s campaign webmaster chooses to configure a website will be any indication of how the candidate would lead the executive branch of government. It&#x27;s probably better to look at the candidate&#x27;s previous leadership performance and his or her positions (as indicated by voting records, not campaign rhetoric) on policy issues.

This is probably a relevant XKCD:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;932&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;932&#x2F;</a><p>Campaign websites, especially at this point in the race, are as cheap and fast and possible. The tech that will win a presidency will be almost entirely behind the scenes--data collection, email segmenting, volunteer coordinating, etc.

Google Pagespeed: hillaryclinton.com 52 (Desktop) &#x2F; 41 (Mobile) tedcruz.org 69 &#x2F; 52 randpaul.com 59 &#x2F; 44 marcorubio.com 76 &#x2F; 51

Presidential campaigns have most definitely gone very high-tech. The Obama campaign was run by some really smart guys (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Harper_Reed" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Harper_Reed</a>) using lots of services on AWS. Check out their infrastructure diagram (heads-up its 60MB).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropboxusercontent.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;14405212&#x2F;AWSOFA-Print-27x240.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropboxusercontent.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;14405212&#x2F;AWSOFA-Print-27...</a><p>Finally, here is a great tech talk video by the Obama for America tech team lead by CTO Harper Reed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg</a>

hillaryclinton.com: Mail server: Gmail<p>Ironic given she&#x27;s such an expert on running her own mail server...

CloudFlare 3 - Fast.ly 1<p>PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(<p>GoDaddy 2 :-((<p>(well, I guess you can tell what PL I prefer)

hillaryclinton.com has some sweet ASCII art when you open up the console. A fun little easter egg.

3 out of 4 candidate website do not support winxp. Wonder if this finally means that winxp compatibility is no longer worth the extra trouble from a business perspective.

I have no idea how to read the table on that site.<p>What is the difference between a red check mark and a green check mark?<p>What is the difference between a red X and a green X?

This reminds when the Joe Lieberman campaign said their site was hacked when it was really just cheap setup.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;finding-lieberman-site-wasnt-hacked&#x2F;comment-page-1&#x2F;?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;finding-liebe...</a>

I 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.

Hillary also uses Webfonts by Hoefler, Modernizr, jQuery, Google Analytics, Font Awesome and possible a heavily modified version of Bootstrap.

I&#x27;d love to see a comparison of front end tech and general quality of their html&#x2F;css&#x2F;js.

This chart might be incorrect for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hillaryclinton.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hillaryclinton.com</a>, BuiltWith shows it is using:<p>- Microsoft IIS 8 for a server<p>- ASP.NET<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;builtwith.com&#x2F;hillaryclinton.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;builtwith.com&#x2F;hillaryclinton.com</a><p>No mention of python.

It&#x27;s bemusing that we are to assume this is the USA presidential candidate - neither of the strings &#x27;usa&#x27; or &#x27;america&#x27; appear on the page. Other countires that have presidents presumably need to identify themselves so as to not confuse (other) people.

Why are they using Privacy&#x2F;Proxy domain registration services?

All 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.

How does one achieve origin ip unknown?

Ah, but <i>their</i> sites are using encryption. What&#x27;s more important is what they think about <i>everyone else</i> using encryption - and whether they should be using &quot;golden split key front doors&quot; or not. Do a chart for that next.