Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Post hoc ergo propter hoc....
Monday I complained that Secretary of State Jason Gant was asleep at the switch again, this time denying the public useful information about the 2014 election schedule. One commenter felt such piffling details shouldn't be a priority for the Secretary of State and that we should just all haul our lazy keesters down to the courthouse to do our own research.
But another commenter notes that Secretary Gant's priorities appear to have realigned more toward mine. Unlike Monday, when the Upcoming Election page linked to information about the 2012 election, as of today the Upcoming Election page has been updated to reflect information about the upcoming election. Some of the updates are purely cosmetic: for example, the "How to circulate a statewide ballot question petition for 2014" link still points to the old 2012 flyer, complete with 2012 deadlines. And we still don't have 2014 election calendars with those yummy deadlines that got us thinking about this website in the first place. But at least someone's getting on the task.
How very, very nice... and how very, very coincidental that the update happens just a couple days after a concerned citizen hollers.
Thank you, Secretary Gant!
I'm sure Mr. Gant has a coordinated schedule and his staff are cracking away at it in proper order. Why would they make superficial changes without any substance if that wasn't just step 1 with step 2 of the webmastering coming very soon? I, for one, am glad to see you give Mr. Gant some credit he is due.
Actually, what Grudz calls Step 2 would usually be Step 1: create the materials, then publish and link those materials.
Looks like they have a CMS. Without one it's not so easy. Especially, when half of their work is contracted out b/c of shortages. This is why I find pointing out mundane details is rather hilarious considering the level of knowledge that people have on the subject. If only it were as easy as making a blog post with a link and things just put themselves together.
Baloney, DB. Quit making excuses. It is that easy. You know it and I know it. If the budget has been cut so much that the SoS doesn't have resources to change a few links and upload a few new documents, then the GOP has really hamstrung good government.
No budget cuts....just no workers to fill the positions. They've been looking for years, which is why they have resorted to outside developers.... ;) And no, it's not that easy when you are using dynamic forms unless you have a cms to dynamically create pages. That, in itself, takes 100's, if not, 1000's of hours to make. Throwing up a static page is easy, but who does that these days?
I don't know what a cms is but people say that many positions are vacant and more of them lately. That might also be why this CMS thing isn't working or the links for an election that is way in the future isn't a top priority. I'm just sayin...
I'm sure that Mr. Gant wouldn't let a blog drive him to do something he wasn't already going to do, or if it did he would have done it all the way or put one of those "Men At Work" construction signs showing that it was being worked on.
So Cory who do the Dems run against Gant?
or Jacklow for that matter.
We all praise Gnat for doing his job like he was a fireman or something. The dude is a public servant that works for us and was shamed into finally trotting over to get it done. Mr. Gnat is really why folks have a disdain for politics in many regards and one of those regards is that they are so work brittle. Dude needs to go and should have been impeached for his dereliction of duties.
Maybe this is my conspiracy mind thinking but what if Mr. Gant steps down like that School Commissioner guy Jarrod. What if they do that so they can appoint some hand-picked replacement who gets the legs up in the election? He could set it up so his deputy or ex-deputy gets the job and carries it on. Would they get a full 8 more years then or just 4 more?
I read that Mr. Gant wouldn't get to pick his own replacer so that's out. It seemed like a good theorem at first.
If the SOS is spending hundreds of hours paying someone to create those pages, they are wasting their time and our money. I could install WordPress and replicate 90% of that site in a week. Integrating the campaign finance and corporate filing databases takes longer, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a basic page with links to documents. Why are you running interference for Gant on this one, DB? If you had employees building a website for you and they were dawdling like this, wouldn't you fire them... or send them back for training?
And are you trying to tell me that dogpile of a front page represents hundreds or thousands of hours of work on a sophisticated Content Management System? Again, hogwash. My front page looks better than that.
Cory, all these departments are using the same resources to get things done and developers are hard to find. Priorities matter for which projects takes precedence and from who. I'm not going to sit and argue why WordPress would never work and why adding a simple user ctrl tied to a database and updated by a cms isn't just a few clicks. When you have 100's of thousands of dollars in servers and licensing, you don't take development lightly. There is a lot more that goes into it than you are aware of. They will especially not open their systems up to 3rd party software like WordPress that has hackers dedicated to finding bugs in their system to exploit. That is a security no-no. Throw in all the hoops you have to jump through to get something done and that adds even more time into the issue. And yes, if that dogpile of a front page is dynamic, it could take a lot of time to create. Most home pages run me 30-40 hours just for front end development and database work. Throw in a cms and that doubles very quickly. Nice thing is I can try to reuse a lot of that on other pages throughout the site to keeps costs lower.