ChangeTracker
ChangeTracker watches the White House’s web site so you don’t have to. Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov changes, we’ll let you know — via E-mail, Twitter, or RSS.
Subscribe to the rare changes RSS feed (or see every change on the all changes RSS feed) |
Follow @changetracker to see the rare changes
|
Sign up to receive a daily list of rare changes via e-mail |
White House Site Un-Slams Bush on Katrina
ChangeTracker, our vigilant and all-seeing widget, is barely a day old, and already it’s netted a revealing tweak to the White House Web site.
If you’d dialed up the “Additional Issues” portion of the Web site’s “Agenda” section earlier this week, the entry on Hurricane Katrina would have left you with zero doubt about who was to blame for the governmental failure to respond to the storm: the Bush administration. “President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” the section read, continuing:
“President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration’s ‘unconscionable ineptitude’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.” (Emphasis mine.)
The language was eye-raising enough to merit a brief story in Politico last month (“New White House Site Slams Bush”) and a complaint from the conservative blog the Corner: “Does this really have to appear on the White House website?”
Well, apparently not. As of today, ChangeTracker tells us, the references to the Bush administration have been deleted. You can see a side-by-side comparison of the new and old version of the passages here.
The old language (click on the image to see the comparison):
The new version (click on the image to see the comparison):
The new version remains highly critical of the government response, to be sure, but readers are left to themselves to finger blame. We’ve put in a call to the White House for an explanation of the change, and we’ll let you know if they get back to us.
This isn’t the first time that Obama’s transition from campaigner to above-the-political-fray executive has revealed itself on his Web sites. Back in November, we noted that Obama’s transition site had muted many of the direct criticisms of Bush: Gone, for instance, was a passage stating, “The Bush Administration has been one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history.”
Obama bashed Bush on the stump continuously for about 20 months. But by and large, the White House Web site has abstained from conspicuous criticisms of Bush – resulting in an oddly unblemished biography of our 43rd president on the site, one, as Slate noted, that “says nothing about Iraq, Katrina, Gitmo, Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales, or anything else you might’ve lost sleep over these past eight years.”
Note: For those of you wanting to use our ChangeTracker widget to keep tabs on changes at the Web site of your choice, check out our tutorial.
ProPublica Announces New ‘ChangeTracker’ Tool To Reveal Updates & Changes to Government Web Sites
ProPublica Announces New ‘ChangeTracker’ Tool To Reveal Updates & Changes to Government Web Sites
New York, N.Y. (Feb. 20, 2009)—ProPublica, the investigative newsroom, today launched a new tool called ChangeTracker that will enable users to monitor changes made to the WhiteHouse.gov, Recovery.gov and the upcoming FinancialStability.gov Web sites.
ChangeTracker lets users see exactly what was removed, edited or updated on those sites by showing side-by-side comparisons of sites before and after changes made to them. Should the Obama administration decide to alter the language on a proposal or backtrack on a claim, users of ChangeTracker will immediately see what changed. Users can be notified of the new information via RSS, Twitter (by following @changetracker), daily email or on the ChangeTracker Web page.
“ProPublica’s mission is to hold the powerful accountable for their actions,” said Scott Klein, ProPublica’s director of online development. “ChangeTracker will help us keep an eye on the administration’s transparency pledges, and will help reporters, bloggers, government watchdogs and everyday citizens keep watch over the Web sites of their elected officials.”
“This is a tool that local news organizations can use to follow the government officials they report on,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s managing editor. “Any city, state or federal reporter can adapt ChangeTracker to their needs. And as a non-profit, we’re proud that we can share this feature with other media outlets.”
The ChangeTracker methodology will be open sourced so that others can use it on Web sites of their choice. Brian Boyer, a ProPublica intern who helped create the NewsMixer tool while he was a Knight Foundation Scholar at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, created this new project.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With the largest news staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting, ProPublica is supported entirely by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.
Steal Our Code: How to Build Your Own Change-Tracking Feeds
ChangeTracker watches the White House’s web site so you don’t have to. Whenever a page on whitehouse.gov changes, we’ll let you know — via e-mail, Twitter, or RSS.
But ChangeTracker is not a piece of software. It’s the output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly connected over the Internet. Here’s how to do it yourself so you can track changes on any Web site on the Internets.
Quick Start:
Versionista and Yahoo! Pipes do most of the heavy lifting, so rolling your own change tracker is an easy process: simply tell Versionista to watch the page, then point a copy of our Yahoo! Pipe to Versionista:
1. Set up Versionista
Sign up for a free account at Versionista, and give it a Web page to watch. Make sure you select the option to make the site archive you’ve created public, otherwise part 3 won’t work.
2. Take a break
Grab a coffee, take a nap or finish graduate school. Unless you’re monitoring a frequently updated site, you’ll need to just sit back and wait for something to change. This may take minutes; it may take days.
3. Set up the Yahoo! Pipe
Clone the Automagic Versionista Feed Maker pipe, and run your cloned pipe, sending it the URL of Versionista public archive you created. (The URL will look like: http://versionista.com/pub/#####/1/all)
Important: If Versionista hasn’t detected any changes, the feed will be empty, but it will start filling once the page starts changing.
3½. Catch More Fish (optional)
To catch changes on more than one site, add a pipe for each domain, and shuffle the feed together by copying (what Yahoo! calls “cloning”) and editing our ChangeTracker pipe.
4. Control your feed
The output of Yahoo! Pipes is an RSS Feed with a long URL.
Routing your feed through FeedBurner will give your new tracker a nice URL and the ability to provide your and your readers with a daily e-mail digest of changes. It will also give you all kinds of statistics and useful information about your subscribers.
5. Extra credit
If you want to go whole-hog, create a Twitter account for your feed and use FriendFeed to transform tracked changes into tweets. These steps are left as an exercise to the reader.
6. Let us know?
We’d love to hear about how you’re using ChangeTracker. Drop us an email at changetracker@propublica.org or a tweet to @changetracker!
Loading ChangeTracker feed...
Want to track changes somewhere else? We’ve put together instructions on how you can build your very own tracker to watch any web site.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. We strive to foster change through exposing exploitation of the weak by the strong and the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.
Special thanks to Cayusa for taking the original photograph for our Twitter icon! Thanks also to the Tango Project for creating the email icon used above.
© Copyright 2010 Pro Publica Inc.
FREE REPRINTS
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles and graphics (but not our photographs) for free. You just have to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately. (We're licensed under Creative Commons, which provides the legal details.)