Skip to main content

Ontario Election Sites: Technology =~ Politics?

I'm hosting the Ontario Green Party's site, and am also the Drupal developer for it. There's currently an Ontario election campaign taking place, so I'm keeping busy. Someone sent me a dead link on the Ontario NDP site, so I started looking at the other party's sites. It reminded me of a discussion we had at the Toronto Penguin day a couple of years ago about the relationship between open source software (and Drupal in particular) and politics. I think there's something there - for example:

  1. the Toronto Drupal Users' Group's (supposed?) left-leaning politics
  2. the Howard Dean campaign (which was the beginning of the civicspace distribution of drupal)
  3. Richard Stallman's involvement in Venezuela

I'll let you use google to confirm or deny any of the above ...but also to be noted, there's nothing that prevents any cause from making use of open source technology for nefarious and/or right-wing causes (oops, my bias is showing!).

So, I thought I'd survey what kind of technology the four parties are using and see about correlations:

  1. Liberal: Using ASP (a microsoft proprietary technology), probably a custom application judging from the urls. Hosted using Microsoft-IIS/6.0 on a machine with a bluecho.com reverse lookup - BluEcho looks like it was just bought by EntirelyDigital (http://w3.entirelydigital.com/). They seem to be located on Bloor St. here in Toronto. Using a .ca domain.
  2. Conservative Also uses ASP (but not .aspx like the Liberal party), also a custom application, also on Microsoft-IIS/6.0. No comment regarding policies... But on a magma.ca server (an Ottawa-based company, has offices in Toronto), and on a .com domain (what does that say?)
  3. NDP Using Drupal, but still using 4.7 (last full update was only 4.7.3, I hope they've installed the security patches since then!). The domain resolves to an ip with no reverse lookup, so I'm not sure who they're hosting with. Their mail is using megamailservers.com, which is a mass hosting private label company for mail. Unfortunately, the secure domain which handles their donations was broken (no response) a couple of days ago, and now gives various errors (e.g. they registered the certificate to the wrong domain...). Conclusion: I think they need some technical help, but the ideals are good. Definitely: upgrade to Drupal 5. Did they choose a .com domain because it used to be cheaper? Trying to increase mass appeal?
  4. Green Party Using Drupal 5, hosted on a virtual server out in Kelowna (rackforce.com) with good green credentials, running CentOS (open source version of RedHat Enterprise Linux). Too bad they also host Windows. I had the advantage that I started the site from scratch, no baggage to carry.

Leaving conclusions for the reader to draw. Don't get carried away.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The Tyee: Bricolage and Drupal Integration

The Tyee is a site I've been involved with since 2006 when I wrote the first, 4.7 version of a Drupal module to integrate Drupal content into a static site that was being generated from bricolage. About a year ago, I met with Dawn Buie and Phillip Smith and we mapped out a number of ways to improve the Drupal integration on the site, including upgrading the Drupal to version 5 from 4.7. Various parts of that grand plan have been slowly incorporated into the site, but as of next week, there'll be a big leap forward that coincides with a new design [implemented in Bricolage by David Wheeler who wrote and maintains Bricolage] as well as a new Drupal release of the Bricolage integration module . Plans Application integration is tricky, and my first time round had quite a few issues. Here's a list of the improvements in the latest version: File space separation. Before, Drupal was installed in the apache document root, which is where bricolage was publishing it's co...
Read more

A Strange Passion for Security

I'm not a computer security expert, but it's been part of my work for many years, in different forms.  A very long time ago, a friend hired me to write up a primer for internet security, and ever since then it's been a theme that's sat in the background and pops up every now and then . But lately, it's started to feel like more than a theme, and but indeed a passion. You may consider computer and internet security to be a dry subject, or maybe you imagine feelings of smugness or righteousness, but "passion" is the right word for what I'm feeling. Here's google's definition: Passion: 1. a strong and barely controllable emotion. 2. the suffering and death of Jesus. Okay, let's just go with number 1. for now. If you followed my link above to other posts about security, you'll notice one from eight years ago where I mused on the possibility of the discovery of a flaw in how https works. Weirdly enough, a flaw in https was discovered shortly...
Read more

Orchestrating Drupal + CiviCRM containers into a working site: describing the challenge

In my previous posts, I've provided my rationale for making use of Docker and the microservices model for a boutique-sized Drupal + CiviCRM hosting service. I've also described how to build and maintain images that could be used for the web server (micro) service part of such a service. The other essential microservice for a Drupal + CiviCRM website is a database, and fortunately, that's reasonably standard. Here's a project that minimally tweaks the canonical Mariadb container by adding some small configuration bits:  https://github.com/BlackflySolutions/mariadb That leaves us now with the problem of "orchestration", i.e. how would you launch a collection of such containers that would serve a bunch of Drupal + CiviCRM sites. More interestingly, can we serve them in the real world, over time, in a way that is sustainable? i.e. handle code updates, OS updates, backups, monitoring, etc? Not to mention the various crons that need to run, and how about things ...
Read more