A tale of two party websites

By Michelle Malkin  •  January 3, 2008 09:45 PM

There’s always a lot of talk about the technological/Internet advantage the Left has over the Right.

The performance of the Iowa political party sites painfully underscored the conventional wisdom.

1iowadem.jpg

The Democrat party website loads quickly and has been constantly updated with caucus results.

1iowagop.jpg

The Republican party website…sucks. If you can manage to get through to it, that is.

Sigh.

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  1. #208474
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 9:47 pm, NeoConNews said:

    Wow, you’re right. The GOP is definitely behind in the internet age. Not that you needed someone to tell you that given the number of paulnuts and truthers that infest the interweb.

  2. #208477
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm, an-artist said:

    wow. they need a redesign. badly.

  3. #208478
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm, bvw said:

    More interest from Republicans. Dems are not web savvy.
    That is, my theory is the GOP site is getting far more hits.
    Second theory — the IOWA GOP site is designed with TOO MANY GIMMICKS.

  4. #208483
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 pm, gandolphxx said:

    The GOP site is worthless – nobody can connect to it – stupid tactic.

  5. #208485
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm, zorro said:

    The GOP webmasters need to get some advice from David Verklin and Bernice Kanner!

  6. #208486
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:04 pm, Jaded said:

    I got into it but it was definitely nothing special….and no updates…pretty pathetic.

  7. #208489
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 pm, DaMav said:

    I agree, this is an embarassment. Aren’t we supposed to be the competent party? Geez, who is minding the store? This might have been acceptable ten years ago.

    I tried numerous times to get through, got a blank screen, then when it finally loaded at least partially it was worthless.

    This was a night they could have gotten a lot of hits and used the eyeballs to drive party info, party pride… they blew it. I hope someone gets called on the carpet at a minimum.

  8. #208500
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm, katieanne said:

    I was never able to get through.

  9. #208510
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:25 pm, ThackerAgency said:

    Hey what do you expect? The Republicans are just like my dad. . . they have been successful before and never needed it, why should they need it now.

    They don’t need to pony up extra for the bandwidth needed, they can host it on dial up can’t they? Isn’t it the same internet anyway?

    The GOP had better wake up or Obama will be claiming to have invented the blogosphere and people will believe him like they believed Gore invented the internet.

  10. #208513
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 pm, Innismir said:

    I was never able to haul up the Iowa GOP website 100%. If I were there SysAdmin, I would be embarrassed. Way to plan guys.

    Their overuse of Flash also probably killed them on the bandwidth.

    Where do I send my business card? I could use a nice consulting gig.

  11. #208522
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:33 pm, islandman78 said:

    Duh!

    Here in California there are two parties: the Corrupt Party and the Stupid Party.

  12. #208523
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:34 pm, Innismir said:

    I found why the Republicans failed, and the Democrats won on the web server front. I looked at the web page source, and saw “http://s3.amazonaws.com/caucuspublic/index_live.html”

    This is EXACTLY how I would have done it. Amazon has services that allow you to host data on it’s massive servers, which you pay per GB. It’s extremely cheap, and scale great. Check out this explaination.

    I’ll tip my hat to the Democratic sysadmin, you planned well.

    Ugh… I need to brush my teeth now.

  13. #208544
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 pm, Thomas said:

    Um… Seems to work fine for me. I got a cool google map of Iowa with an interactive display of who won county by county. Mouseover to see complete details.

    /firefox 2.0.0.11 with flash 9 update 3.

    *shrugs*

  14. #208557
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 pm, Innismir said:

    Thomas, #13

    It’s gotten better, but during the rush it was slower the molasses going uphill on a cold day.

  15. #208560
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 pm, Thomas said:

    Maybe they browser was swamped with too many requests while other people were accessing the interactive google map and there was too much traffic. I don’t know.

    If the page shows up as a grey screen, then the webmasters should have enabled some sort of browser detection to re-direct to an alternate html display that ran simpler and faster.

    – I guess so, Innismir. I just checked it a few moments ago, when it’s all over.

  16. #208569
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 11:19 pm, Innismir said:

    Thomas, #15
    You hit the nail on the head for the most part. A ton of people were trying to get into their website, and they were overwhelmed. They should have expected it and planned accordingly, they got caught with their pants down.

    The Google map is new actually, when I was there earlier it wasn’t there.

  17. #208570
    On January 3rd, 2008 at 11:19 pm, Jeddite said:

    “Series of tubes” etc.

  18. #208604
    On January 4th, 2008 at 12:10 am, Klaatu said:

    I know I’m late to the party…. earlier I couldn’t get in. But now! the first thing that loads is the Google map for the DEMOCRAT results. There is a link at the top to their main page.

    Once there, you can’t find the stupid map of Republican results. I stumbled on it and it was the same Google map with the Republican results instead of the Dems.

    The way google maps work means we should have been able to get to them a different way. I guess the Iowans are running their site on ethanol.

  19. #208650
    On January 4th, 2008 at 1:48 am, William Amos said:

    Man dont get me started on this issue. I have warred with the RNC and other Republican leaders for over a decade over thier dinosaur like thinking.

    This is why the republicans lost Congress and why we might lose the White House. The pundits and talking heads of the Republicans treat elections like High School plays while the democrats treat elections like a Business.

    This is just one more example of how clueless the republican leadership is on how to handle things

  20. #208662
    On January 4th, 2008 at 2:19 am, nyc123me said:

    I just tried and both sites responded immediately. Do not forget, there are plenty of nutcases out there likely flooding the Repub site for the very reason that they hate anything non-Dem. MM has her fair share of attacks here.

  21. #209105
    On January 4th, 2008 at 2:08 pm, Innismir said:

    nyc123me, #20
    Possible on the DoS (Denial of Service) hypothesis, but judging how the website was responding last night, it just “felt” overwhelmed.

    Occam’s Razor suggests it’s a bunch of people just trying to get election results, rather then a deliberate attack.

  22. #209276
    On January 4th, 2008 at 5:11 pm, KaosKlerik said:

    On January 4th, 2008 at 2:08 pm, Innismir said:
    nyc123me, #20
    Possible on the DoS (Denial of Service) hypothesis, but judging how the website was responding last night, it just “felt” overwhelmed.

    Occam’s Razor suggests it’s a bunch of people just trying to get election results, rather then a deliberate attack.

    With 93.5 percent of precincts reporting, Iowa Democratic Party officials reported 218,000 caucus attendees, compared to 124,000 in 2004. Iowa Republican Party officials reported projections of about 114,000 people taking part, shattering the numbers of 2000 Republican caucuses won by George W. Bush that drew 87,666. MM

    Dems had a massive influx of new caucus voters, but they were able to handle it.

    No excuses, just fix it.

  23. #214277
    On January 10th, 2008 at 9:48 am, whysoangry said:

    They have internet access in Iowa?

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