Anybody Home at Whitehouse.gov? by Declan McCullagh
WASHINGTON -- President Bush not only got the keys to the White House this weekend, but he also took over the official whitehouse.gov website.
While the new president's speedily organized inaugural celebration concluded without incident in a chill rain, the launch of the Bush administration's Web presence was not as successful.
Dozens of links return error messages, and the home page appears to have sported an unusual slogan on the left-hand rail when it first went up on Saturday: "Insert Something Meaningful Here." <http://www.wired.com/news/photo/0,1860,41319,00.html>
At high noon on Saturday, as Bush and Vice President Cheney took oaths of office on the Capitol building steps, the new administration officially took over the whitehouse.gov domain.
Many of the text-only whitehouse.gov pages, designed for readers who are visually impaired or have low-bandwidth connections, return broken links. Clicking on the text-only option from the search page results in a malformed link with the title "http://www.whitehouse.gov/."
Links at the bottom of the White House History page -- including past first families, first ladies, or tour information -- return "404: The page cannot be found".
In the children's area of whitehouse.gov, the Historic Moments page includes broken links to images of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
On the home page, the placeholder message "Insert Something Meaningful Here" briefly appeared on the left side of the screen, according to a Wired News reader who saved a screen snapshot. The message, according to the snapshot, appeared under "President George W. Bush is Inaugurated as President of the United States" and above "Recent Additions."
In the economic statistics section, HTML formatting commands frequently appeared instead of charts or text.
The money page, presumably devoted to currency statistics, instead features a series of "BORDER=1 HEIGHT=100 WIDTH=125" HTML tags. So does the bottom of the production statistics page.
Administration officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday.
Bush transition spokesman Tucker Eskew told Agence France Presse last week that he expected that the new whitehouse.gov would become "a thorough, informative and content-rich website for everyone to use."
One explanation for the glitches is that the launch was rushed by the uncertainty over the outcome of the election: Bush's aides had barely a month to prepare.
They managed to succeed in other areas, however. An Associated Press article reports how "the Oval Office, redone with astonishing speed and a feminine touch in muted shades of peaches and cream, was a haven of polish and serenity among the mess of rolled up carpets and paint chips that was the West Wing" just days ago.
The outgoing administration never had to worry about such problems. It launched its website in October 1994, nearly two years after President Clinton was elected for the first time.
"What we're doing is bringing the entire federal government to your desktop computer," then-Vice President Gore said at the unveiling ceremony.
Quips Phill Hallam-Baker, a consultant who helped to craft the original whitehouse.gov site: "The site looks like an extremely dimpled chad."
"We always considered it as much a part of the White House as the president's seal or the White House itself," says Hallam-Baker, a Democratic Party supporter. "It's got to look good."
He said that an MIT intern wrote much of the code for whitehouse.gov publications database -- a popular document archive that's now offline -- in Symbolics Lisp, a programming language uncommon outside of academia. "They might have a bit of difficulty getting that up again," Hallam-Baker said. "I doubt that (the former Democratic intern) is disposed to assist at this point."
The National Archives, as part of the agency's Clinton presidential materials project, is preserving the outgoing administration's website in its entirety.
As the transition from the old to the new White House website took place at noon on Saturday, the site went offline for about five minutes.
The current whitehouse.gov site is hosted in the Washington area and receives connectivity via GTE Data Services, a Verizon company, according to a traceroute.