Day: December 1, 2005

Some stream-of-consciousness impressions as I go through the big three party websites.

NDP: features a prominent “youth” link on the main page. Nice. Items in the RSS feed are just a headline and a one-sentence summary; I want full content! Why am I only getting the “rapid response” items in my aggregator? There are lots of headlines and stories and they must be posted somewhere. Aha… the RSS feed on the headlines page covers all categories. There’s no indication that feeds are different, boo. This is a nice-looking site… I’ve never been a big fan of the green-and-orange colour scheme, but it’s toned down or integrated better, making everything more appealing to the eye than either of the other two.

Conservatives: next in the menus after “founding principles” is “c-boutique”, the party store. Seems apt. As long as I use Flashblock I can see the dropdown menus, but now I can’t navigate into them because they disappear as soon as I move the mouse from the menu title. Fortunately the title is clickable, but that only gets me to the first item and there’s no navigation to the rest. The tour blog… no RSS feed which means I probably won’t see it again. Started off a little lighthearted and focused on the campaign, but quickly gets into anti-Liberal rhetoric. Strange that it’s anonymous… the writer refers to him/herself but isn’t named. Who is “I”?

Curiouser and curiouser:

By now, I’m sure you’ve had a chance to visit the tour blog. [javascript: link excised –ed.] It’s being written by a good friend of mine from inside Harper’s bus!

Like the official Conservative campaign blog, and despite the familiar tone with which the above is written, the “youth blog” is also entirely anonymous. Reading the “About Us” page doesn’t help either: Who are we? We are young conservatives…. we are CPC Energy.

Liberals: Feschuk’s campaign blog is funny, but there’s no and now there’s an RSS feed. Hey, why don’t you add one to be nice to that minion of Jason Kenney’s? Might as well let him/her misinterpret your posts on the fly. Podcasting link looks interesting but there’s no content yet—see previous RSS comment. Hmm, the Liberals have youth, women’s, seniors and aboriginal “commissions” (which I guess are internal party groups). Too bad they’re logos with tiny burned-in graphical text… I don’t know many seniors who’ll be able to see the graphic meant for them, and the aboriginal peoples logo is almost unreadable in those colours at that size.

Sheesh, it’s 2 a.m.? That’s enough for tonight.

Thought I’d do a quick objective review of the big three national political party websites from a technology perspective. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, although one is an obvious leader.

The NDP party website is run with open-source software. They have an RSS feed (although it’s not <link/>ed for autodetection and easy subscription). The site is functional—it’s nice to see a Search form—and accessible (as judged by Lynx).

Next on the list are the Liberals. Their site is run with what appears to be custom-developed software (written in .NET, which means they’re running on a Windows server). There’s no RSS in sight, and not even a prominent form to sign up for party news via e-mail. Lynx shows pages full of [left_main_pic.gif], [spacer.gif], and the like, but at least it’s logically laid out so you can navigate through the whole site.

Then there are the Conservatives. The website is built on commercial PHP-based software. Unfortunately it features a lot of Flash-for-Flash’s sake, which (in Firefox at least) means their Javascript dropdown menus are completely hidden behind the slideshows of static images. (There’s also a fairly major problem with the fading text in the “banner”, which is cutting off lowercase characters’ descenders… familv, communitv, unitv.) They do have a unique feature in targeted RSS feeds: you can choose from stories, press releases, speeches, and so on. Accessibility is a beast though. Navigation links are all jammed together (VolunteerDonateJoineNews SignupSend an eCardRequest a lawn signContact Us) and there are a few [cpc-ReadMore.jpg] image placeholders visible; worst of all, though, is that content is intermingled with sidebars, headers, footers, etc., with a lot of each page’s unique material relegated to the very bottom of the page.

So I think the conclusion is obvious: If it were all about the technology, the NDP would have my vote. Of course, they haven’t chosen a candidate in my riding yet…. And now they have: Stephen Maynard.

Unsurprisingly, but unfortunately, none of the sites detects the language the browser prefers. Both the Conservative and NDP websites default to English but provide a link to the French version; the Liberal site makes the user choose on its splash screen, which I guess is marginally better.