Top all-time · #5193
Kyle Rush
Personal blog · kylerush.net/blogwebbusiness
Kyle Rush's personal blog at kylerush.net covers web and business. Since 2012, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kyle Rush's posts about the 2012 Obama campaign's web work: a static Jekyll and S3 fundraising site and A/B-tested optimization of the donation page.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2012-11-28
- Optimization at the Obama campaign: a/b testing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-12
What Hacker News says?
I don't know what metric the parent comment is referring to, but in terms of technology stack, I can fully believe that the Romney team spent more than Obama's team. Here's a post by one of the creators of the fundraising platform: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio... The short of it is: they used static HTML generated by Jekyll and stored on S3.
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “How I Fired Myself”Submitted Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform as a story · 335 points
HN discussionExcept the most successful political fundraising machine in history that ran on Jekyll [0] :P [0] http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “The shittiest project I ever worked on”Submitted Optimization at the Obama campaign: a/b testing as a story · 83 points
HN discussionHow about Googles Doubleclick (2016): 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load [1]. Mobify (2016): For every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed, Mobify's customer base saw a 1.11% lift in session based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $376,789. Similarly, for every 100ms decrease in checkout page load speed, Mobify's customers saw a 1.55% li…
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “Building a Shop with Sub-Second Page Loads: Lessons Learned”Submitted Busting the small startups can't A/B test myth as a story · 27 points
HN discussionPeople are looking to static sites more and more for a couple of reasons: 1. speed - you can't beat an optimized static sites hosted on a CDN. In part I suppose the increased focus on speed i driven by mobile traffic. 2. Github - front-end developers have now gotten really used to having everything under version control. Dumping the most important content into an unversioned database just doesn't feel as good as hav…
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “Show HN: Add forms to your static site – no iFrames required”Submitted A/B testing is for engineers too as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs has been noted on HN at the time, the front-facing part of the site was released as open-source 3 months ago: https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: htt…
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404”Submitted User testing is surprisingly effective as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think this may be the story you intended to include with your second link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842510 http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers”Submitted Tips for working with JSON APIs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSeparate from the morality/public service bit (which I agree with rayiner about), I think it's interesting that public sector work is often the most demanding and rewarding (not in a feel-good sense) work out there. Usually this is equated with law/diplomatic positions, but I think there's something about the low-budget quick-turnaround nature and general sense of gravitas that brings out the best work of people. I…
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers”Submitted Super fast site architecture as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe campaign's site was also static (see http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio... )
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “The way government does tech is outdated and risky”Submitted Quantifying and reducing user frustration as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've only recently heard of jekyll but have been searching or thinking about creating a markdown based blog for a while. I first discovered it through an article on the obama campaign, and how they used it in combination with AWS:S3 http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio... . Jekyll is here to stay.
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “The Immediate Future of Jekyll”Submitted User Testing is surprisingly effective: Lessons from the Obama campaign as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA similar "static site" approach (using Jekyll and Akamai) was used by the Obama campaign's fundraising site. There was a good write-up about it a while back: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
Comment linking /blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/
on “Flat Files And Server Denials: Covering Elections At Three News Orgs”I like the following: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ http://marketingexperiments.com http://whichtestwon.com/ http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-... (previously mentioned)
Comment linking /blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing/
on “Ask HN: Any great blog posts discussing results of A/B Testing?”Definitely check out Kyle Rush's report on the optimization of the Obama Campaign's donation page via A/B testing. Here's the link: http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-th e-obama-campaign-ab-testing/
Comment linking /blog/optimization-at-th
on “Ask HN: Any great blog posts discussing results of A/B Testing?”Are you considering a/b testing your sign up form? Not too long ago on HN there was an article about how the Obama web team converted their forms into multi-step forms and noticed an increase in conversions. Maybe add a picture showing what is delivered to your door every month? Just a thought. Good luck guys! http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-...
Comment linking /blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing/
on “[Show HN] SimpleCoffeeClub.com”
