Jimmy's weblog

The Australian Labor Party (ALP)

The first of my Australian political party website reviews - better late than never!

On top in alphabetical order, the Australian Labor Party’s website is relatively plain and filled with the rather American red, white and blue (or is it the blue, white and red French tricolour?) of the party. Visiting first thing in the morning, it was rather hard to stomach the eight photos of Mark Latham on the home page and, thanks to the magic of background-repeat, things just get worse when I widened my browser window to find out exactly how many there were.

As you might expect from the working man’s party, free software features prominently from the FreeBSD operating system running the server through to Apache and PHP actually running the site.  It looks like they are running on some expensive Sun hardware though.

Result of Netcraft operating system query.

FreeBSD Apache/1.3.29
Ben-SSL/1.53 (Unix) PHP/4.3.8
Last changed 7-Sep-2004
IP 210.80.166.164
Latest uptime 58.75 days

Result of nmap operating system scan.

[root@localhost]# nmap -sS -F -v -O www.alp.org.au

Starting nmap 3.50 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ )

Running: FreeBSD 4.X|5.X
OS details: FreeBSD 4.3 - 4.4PRERELEASE,
FreeBSD 4.9 - 5.1,
FreeBSD 5.1-CURRENT (June 2003) on Sparc64

Uptime 60.861 days (since Sat Jul 24 16:02:45 2004)

From the outside, it’s often difficult to tell whether a site uses static files to produce web pages or more sophisticated database integration.  One key difference is that dynamic sites often use computer friendly URLs like http://www.politicalparty-x.org.au/policy.php?id=4 rather than the human friendly ones like http://www.politicalparty-y.org.au/policies/conservation.php.  In the first URL, id=4 is used to pass a numeric value to the server which then looks up the policy relating to that number.  In the second, /policies/conservation.php refers to a physical file on the server rather than an entry in a database.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule. As of October 1, 2004, this site is dynamically generated but I make use of Apache’s mod_rewrite so I can use URLs like http://jimmysweblog.net/2004/10/ rather than http://jimmysweblog.net/index.php?m=200410 (though both links should work identically). mod_rewrite intercepts requests to the server and rewrites /2004/10/ as index.php?m=200410, which is then processed by Wordpress and passed to the MySQL database.

Looking at the URLs on www.alp.org.au, it appears they are using static pages for the majority of the site, though the "Search" and "Print" options work in a way which makes me speculate that the site may be database driven. Without having inside access to the developers, it’s almost impossible to know for sure.

For the political junkies, the ALP’s website offers a variety of potentially useful features:

• Email link - Clicking “Email” takes you to a form where you can enter a friend’s name and email address and have the page sent to them.
• Print page - Each page on the site contains a "Print" icon which links to a page light on graphics and suitable for printing.
• Bookmarks - A JavaScript “Add to bookmarks” option is present on every page, though it doesn’t work with Apple’s Safari browser.
• Text version - For those on low-bandwidth connections or using screen readers, the ALP site also offers a text version, completely free of graphics.
• Email list - Below the navigational menu on the left hand side is an input box to submit your email address for regular updates. Doing so results in an email being sent to your address, requiring confirmation before you are subscribed.
• RSS feed - Available at http://alp.org.au/media/rss.php, the RSS feed allows visitors to easily view the latest ALP news without having to visit the site.
• Donate - Clicking "Donate" on the left or right navigation bar leads to a page soliciting online donations via credit card.

As for every language, these have their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written with these computer languages are supposed to follow these rules. However, just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using Markup languages may (for various reasons) not be following these rules.

Although being labelled as such, the home page of the ALP does not validate correctly as XHTML transitional.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3c//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

This is not the result of a major lack of standards compliance, but rather a missing / in a <br /> as well as the literal & symbol being used in several titles.

The page headers contain some simple metadata, with the most important being the description of the page.

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="max-age=300" />
<meta name="author" content="ALP National Secretariat" />
<meta name="description" content="Home Page" />
<meta name="keywords" content="alp,national,federal,mark,latham,opportunity,for,all" />

Not what you would call very sophisticated metadata but it is enough to keep search engines happy.

Overall, the site is fairly professional, functional and well designed, though I definitely think the ALP could use some help from a professional graphic designer.

Tomorrow the Liberal party…