I recently put up a technologically revamped site for Jill Martinez for Congress (CA-24). It used to be a bunch of static pages. It is now a blog-format site with comments, diaries an event calendar and the usual goodies. Now that it’s built, who will come?

below: The Saga of a Web Site, Technical Wankery, and 83 days to know if it works

The Saga of a Web Site

I put it up 13 days from my first meeting with the campaign staff. Thanks to the relative ease of setting up the underlying CivicSpace technology, I actually had a first pass at a demo of the site on my own server with just one Sunday afternoon of work. The next couple days were deciding if it was the sort of thing they wanted. Then about five days were lost to trying to set it up on their cheapass (but previously adequate) hosting. Then on a recommendation from a friend who uses another service, in about two hours I signed up for a new host and copied over the site.

Much was made of the of Joe Lieberman’s $15/month hosting failing on the Sunday before the election. I now have a little personal experience with the shortcomings of $4/month hosting and the magnitudes better $20/month hosting which thus far, doesn’t suck. I dream of getting enough popularity for the campaign to merit a more advanced solution, but until then I think it’s the right strategy to start off with a mid-range web solution.

Technical Wankery

CivicSpace is made with PHP and MySQL. Neither of those are my favorite technologies. So, while the site was easy to set up, and should hopefully be easy to maintain, I’m not confident in the long term prospects of the system. The combo does have definite positives though. There are a lot of hosting services out there which support them. It should be easy to find someone to set them up for you. There are relatively fewer places that can support mod_perl for Scoop (e.g. dailykos). At that point it might be time to step up for the dedicated machine plans that start around $80-$110/month.

CivicSpace is easy but it doesn’t make me want to add to it and make it more awesome. It looks like they’re moving to a services profit model while keeping it at least mostly open source. Maybe the thing to do this time next year will be to directly buy a CivicSpace site plan which will be hosted and administered for you for one low price per month. For a lot of local and small campaign sites that could be just what’s needed. But it doesn’t excite me as a net geek. Ah well.

Making it Succeed

Over the next 83 days Jill’s site will be another point of contact in a regular on-the-ground election campaign. Who will see it? Anyone who gets a flier and goes to the URL printed on it. How much will it contribute? I’ll tell you in 85 days.