Imaginary Landscape
RSS FeedThe moment Barack Obama took the oath of office (the first time), the new whitehouse.gov was launched, promising a new era of government transparency.
Much as I'd like to take credit for discovering the wonderful intersection between politics, government and hard-core Web geekiness, the kudos go to Jason Kottke for his blog post The country's new robots.txt file.
For the non-geeks, robots.txt is a file that is expected and read by search engines to identify directories that you don't want added to their databases. Every site should have one, and it is located in the root directory. Check yours at http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
You can see ours at http://www.imagescape.com/robots.txt.
Before the re-launch, whitehouse.gov's robots.txt file contained more than 2,000 lines. After the launch? Two.
Quite the metaphor.
Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:03AM CDT by brian
Categories: Cool Web Stuff Politics Web News
