Last night, I had to transition the CUA College Democrats' website and Facebook to reflect the new Executive Board (a transition that went far from smoothly). During the process, I asked myself how Macon Phillips (White House Director of New Media) transitioned the White House site to reflect the new president and redesign. Thinking about it, my respect for Phillips grew.
Websites work like this:
Each website has a domain name (like google.com) and the domain name stands in for what is called an IP Address, which is like a phone number for the Internet. However, remembering IP addresses is not easy (one could be something like 209.63.739.610). So, to ease one's memory, things called Domain Name Servers (DNS) exist. They, when there is a site requested, change the URL to the IP address of the server in which the web page resides.
So, my guess on how Phillips transitioned whitehouse.gov is that he simply had a site ready on a new server and then had the record on the DNS change to reflect the new server.
If only my website transitions were so simple.
Friday, April 24, 2009
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Actually, since it takes a few hours (if not days) for the DNS servers to update the new records, it probably wasn't so simple to update whitehouse.gov like that.
ReplyDeleteThe new site went live at pretty much 12.01 PM on inauguration day, so it's much more likely that the new updates were all put up on an internal 'sandbox' server, and the updates were pushed out onto their publishing server at exactly the right time.
It depends on the domain service. Godaddy changes DNS records within 5 minutes (I know for a fact when I took control of a CUA Dems' site and the hosting was changed).
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