http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41319,00.html Anybody Home at Whitehouse.gov? by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 4:00 p.m. Jan. 21, 2001 PST 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." 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: "www.whitehouse.gov/--%20INTERFACE%20LINK%20." 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." [...] Remainder at: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41319,00.html Snapshot of "insert something meaningful here" (also submitted by other readers): http://www.brianwestbrook.com/whitehousegov.html Examples of pages with broken links: http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/text/moments.html http://www.whitehouse.gov/tours/text/map.html Or, for example, click on "text only" from the search page: http://www.whitehouse.gov/search ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----