The Manhattan Project exceeded its initial budget by….oh, only about thirty-three million percent or so.

Problem is, fixing the issues created by these changes seems to be more involved than the documentation implies. Suggested fixes such as commenting out the skip-bdb option in my.cnf did not work in this case.

After spending hours perusing support sites, and banging my head repeatedly against these tables that were being reported as “corrupt” and unrepairable, I finally hit upon a low-tech solution.

I downloaded the actual database files from /var/lib/mysql, tucked it into the /var/lib/mysql directory of a MySQL 5.0 install, exported the SQL queries and re-imported them into my 5.1 install.

This solution isn’t for everyone, of course, because it requires access to a 5.0 install, but it worked for me.

It got me to thinking: viewing the evolving capabilities, style conventions, and sensibilities of the website of this most visible of American institutions might provide insights for communicators of any stripe, whether they be marketers, writers, or political operators/organizations such as the White House is.

Failing that, it’s still an interesting walk through 256-color gifs, table layouts, the dawn of Javascript, and the birth of powerful content management systems.

Since the Clinton-era website was not preserved by the National Archives, I had to turn to Archive.org, “The Internet Wayback Machine”, in order to see the real evolution, as well as the evolving internet face of the subsequent Bush Administration.

Here are some screenshots documenting that evolution. You can click on the screenshots to pull up an embiggened slideshow view.

December 27, 1996

Here we see what the White House website looked like a few days after millions of folks took the wrapping paper off of new PCs, fired up Windows 95, and logged onto the internet using their “free” AOL discs. Very basic, it simply provides a search gateway to computerized press releases and related material.

October 23, 1997

At some point, a decision was reached to put a little more effort into the whitehouse.gov website….but not very much. Here we see just a minimal tiling background applied, and some obligatory “American” elements.

More interestingly, we see the two buttons at the bottom, which show sufficient production value as to look almost out of place. They foreshadow the first major site design, which would launch the next year.

October 22, 1999

This was the first good grab I could get of this version, which launched in 1998 and is the “quintessential” Clinton-Gore version of whitehouse.gov.

For more than three years after launch, this basic, no-frills job would be updated more or less manually to reflect the day’s events.

Note the animated-gif American flags. (Yes, kids, animated GIFs were once popular for uses other than image macros.)

Interestingly, the White House website stayed completely mute on the topic of the contentious election results, which would later be decided in Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000.

January 18, 2001

Here we see the first real “presidential tradition” as far as the White House website is concerned, with the site reverting to a very basic textual layout highlighting various achievements of the Clinton Administration in the days prior to the inauguration of George W. Bush. We will see this tradition repeated on the departure of President Bush in 2009.

February 2, 2001

Clearly eager to extend his stated desire to “restore dignity” to the Presidency to the website, here we see George W. Bush’s web team’s first effort, showing an undignified series of horizontal buttons.

March 3, 2001

Last month’s navigation issue has been massaged by simply using a vertical navigation menu. All jokes aside, Bush’s team was actually working on an “actual” website, and this was just a placeholder to span the gap between the Clinton website and the new one, which would debut in mid-2001.

Since Bush’s Presidency was the first where news and events were truly added to the whitehouse.gov website “as they happened”, we’ll take a look at this new design as it was used during some of the tumultuous events of the 00′s.

September 12, 2001

Here we see that new design reassuring the nation in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

This layout reflects the browser and screen capabilities of the time, which were still hampered by legions of displays capable of only 800×600 resolution at 256 colors. We web designers still had to think about “web safe” colors in those days.

October 7, 2001

Here we see the same crew, running the same website, but clearly getting more comfortable with the tempo of daily operations as they seamlessly transition the White House website to a war footing with the launch of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan.

March 20, 2003

This screenshot of the White House website on the launch of the subsequent Iraq War is more interesting purely for the historical value.

Here we see the infamous “slam dunk” briefing taking place, an image that would be repeatedly presented as the later search for the WMD we used to justify the war was proven to be a fabrication.

We also see other elements that have taken on an almost pop-cultural value, such as the color-coded “Alert Level” device. I’m sure everyone remembers the big shortage of duct-tape on the debut of that “program”.

May 5, 2003

This screenshot captures the White House website as it existed the day of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech by Bush.

It’s worth noting here the propaganda functions of the White House PR machinery in full swing, especially when highlighted by the fact that this later became one of Bush’s most laughed-at moments.

(Lest anyone think I’m singling out Bush for ridicule, archive.org’s record for WhiteHouse.gov ends before Obama’s Presidency, preventing me from grabbing a screenshot of the “Beer Summit“, which I think would be equally instructive in this regard.)

November 6, 2004

Here we see Bush in the wake of his narrow victory over John Kerry in the 2004 election. This was the speech in which Bush talked about “having a lot of political capital” to spend, and planning to spend it. This shot is interesting because it also documents the ongoing acclimation of the Bush White House to disseminating PR online.

This also marks the last time we’ll see this design in use for this retrospective; a new website would be designed and launched in 2007.

February 28, 2007

Here we get to the penultimate Bush Administration version of the site: an elegant and refined design that used, for the first time since the Clinton Administration, a layout that was centered. More importantly, we see the emergence of more modern, CSS-oriented approaches to the design problems presented, though the main layout is still encapsulated in a table.

January 20, 2009

Here’s the White House website on the final day of Bush’s administration. As we can see, it’s locked into the same valedictory approach that Clinton’s outgoing team took in 2001, highlighting the administration’s achievements and Bush’s farewell address.

Today

Barack Obama campaigned on the strength of internet activism and fundraising, and his team’s clear comfort with online media showed straight-away, as this version of the White House website launched within mere days of Obama’s taking office.

Built on the Drupal CMS, it foreshadowed a major government-wide effort to make the undertakings of the government more accessible to citizens, via sites such as data.gov.

Aesthetically, this design seem intended to be bridge the gap between the final Bush layout and the graphical elements, flourishes, and accents that graced Obama’s campaign website and media. Elements from both websites can be found in this design.

Next week, we’ll look at the evolving design trends of major political campaigns. This would be a great time to subscribe to my RSS or follow me on Twitter, hint hint!

God was unavailable for comment on this matter.

It’s clear what joke the original creator of this image is making.

Less clear is why this formula “just works”.

What images and moods does this convey to you? For me, the busy cityscape and washed out colors imbued by the “vintage effect” (more likely a simple hue/saturation adjustment) gives a feeling of wear and weariness that the modernist Helvetica typeface just soaks up and makes its own.

The selection of image, tone, and type conveys a realistic and frank appraisal of its subject matter. Without reading the words, I’d expect some kind of PSA or “Company Image” message.

Think about what this approach could do for example, for BP, whose image has been suffering (and rightfully) for the ham-handed and authoritarian way it’s been handling its corporate image in the wake of the disastrous Gulf oil spill.

Imagine the text in this image said “We’re sorry. And we’re committed to doing better.” Imagine that frank admission coming paired with a comprehensive, real and honest re-engagement with the public on the company’s part. Think about how that would make you feel about re-appraising BP.

Yes, there are certain well-worn tropes in the design field, but some of them exist for a reason. Something as simple as “a bad photo with a vintage effect and Helvetica slapped all over it” can be a game-changer.

That’s the wonderful thing about the design trade, but it’s a double-edged sword: a company that tries to fake a good public relationship with savvy design alone risks having all that expensive messaging rendered moot or worse, made the subject of culture-jamming and subvertising spoofs. (See some examples of the ongoing subvertising of BP here and here.)

Today, of course, it was revealed, if only obliquely and still disputably, that baseball’s overseer, former owner-turned-Commissioner Bud Selig, will not take the action that would remedy that Perfect Debacle, and overturn the call that even the umpire in question now says was flubbed.

Present in much of the wall-to-wall coverage has been criticism of the unfortunate way that the officiating has overshadowed the on-field action in recent weeks. That coverage has frequently taken the stance that baseball’s umpires, fairly unique in the autonomy they’re granted in ensuring the integrity of games, should not be as prominent, that they should be of the bland, interchangeable type favored by other major sporting leagues.

This notion is dead wrong, and here’s why.

What got me thinking about this tonight was a thread on a certain well-known social news site, phrased like a Debate Club resolution: “Agree or Disagree: If you know an Umpire’s name it’s a bad thing.”

So I thought about it for a moment, and words just started flowing.

There’s plenty of room for Umps to be “known names”.

It’s part of The Show, and it’s yet another thing that sets baseball apart from other sports, like football and basketball, that have been over-sanitized, over-packaged, and over-commoditized.

Think about all the Umps that so famously clashed with managers like Billy Martin back in the day. It’s part of the color of the game.

That said, clearly there is a line, and clearly too many umps have been crossing it. Joe West comes to mind, obviously. The wags like Ozzie Guillen are right: people don’t come to the ballpark to see the officials.

But I certainly don’t think Joyce rises to that bad standard. He just had terrible luck, and made what would’ve been, should’ve been, just a run-of-the-mill bad call.

Joyce’s rep in the game is strong enough to provoke a nearly-rhapsodic tribute from the Yankees’ star closer, Mariano Rivera. Jim Joyce was at the crux of The Perfect Debacle, but he’s not at the root of the problem with officiating in baseball.

And it is a problem. But the whole charm of baseball is it’s many idiosyncrasies and anachronistic traditions. No other sport even allows variations in the playing field. Other sports aren’t so prone to even minor variations in weather.

The wind blowing “out” at Wrigley is a game changer, easily worth the value of a cleanup man to the team that’s lucky enough to take advantage of it on a given day. (Most typically, not the home team.)

And so too is the human aspect of the officiating an inseparable part of the game’s true spirit. In no other sport are the definitions of such fundamental game concepts as “balls” and “strikes” so subject to variations that can be exploited by either team, and more importantly, debated endlessly in bars and on blogs.

And what would it do to such classic baseball literature as Casey at the Bat if we removed the whole notion of killing the ump?

Do we need “more” replay? Yes. It’s common sense to make sure the Perfect Debacle never happens again.

But we need to preserve the human angle, too. We track the number of career ejections by managers for a reason: it livens up the games, and hearkens back to a rowdier time when men were men, and bench-clearing brawls meant a lot more than just an exchange of noogies.

Besides, who wants to watch Lou Piniella trying to argue with a machine?

(OK, it’d probably be pretty damn funny, since Piniella grows even more volcanic when met with relative indifference, but my point stands.)

So that’s that. The infinite variability introduced by human officiating is an indelible part of the game of baseball. Case closed.

And while we’re in the general ballpark of rashly mechanizing a sport with such wonderful and endearing 19th-century traditions, let me just offer one final opinion:

To hell with Questec.

—

About the Writer: Brandon Dawson hates writing about himself in the third person, and he’s only published one tech book.

That said, he would run through hell in a gasoline suit to be paid to write about baseball. Have keyboard, will travel.

If you need a guy who can eat column inches for breakfast and you’ve got money, click here to make a dream come true.

Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD seems to have accomplished this by coining the joke word “malamanteau“, a parody of Wikipedians’ never-ceasing zeal for categorizing wordplay into ever-narrower segments and assiduously incorporating those obscure linguistic distinctions into every article.

The resulting brouhaha, whether Munroe intended it or not, has laid bare the truth of essentially every charge anyone has ever laid against the “Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit”, as can plainly be seen on the resulting talk page, a hilarious swirl of earnest editors spewing the lingua franca of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy and “deletionists” and “inclusionists” bickering over the linguistic and encyclopedic merit of the newly-coined word.

Nice work, Mr. Monroe, you’ve successfully pulled in grand fashion that most righteous of pranks: the kind that makes people think. Too bad both the joke and any hope of rational thought seems lost on the Wikipedia hivemind.

Remember those commercials, the ones that ran on national TV, proclaiming some nifty thing you’d be about to do through “the nets” in years to come? I’m speaking of the ones that went on to add, “….and the company that’ll bring it to you, AT&T”.

Those ones?

Most folks aren’t aware that they’ve been paying for those nifty things for twenty years now, and only half of them are getting anything closely resembling the commercials.