Canadian Tech News, Hacks & How To

Lifehacker reposted my Hulu Hack a few days ago. Over 130,000 views to date!

The instructions are a little more straight-forward if you’re on a Mac.

With the looming Canadian federal election, I thought I’d take a look at the federal party websites. I’ll be rating them on 5 characteristics, on a 5 point scale:

• Design: How much I like the look and feel.
• User Interface: How well does the site layout work
• Candidate Info: How good is the info on the candidate in my riding. 
• Web 2.0: How well are they pimping themselves on the social networks, are they including a lot of media, etc. 
• Ease of contributing: Online donations have been a major part of the current US Presidential election. I took a quick look at their contribution processes to see if there were any obvious problems. I didn’t actually donate.

NDP – 92%

• Design: 5. My favorite site. Nice and tidy, good use of orange. Cute icons.
• UI: 4.5. The index page is really well organized. The drop down menus are a little redundant, since most of them only contain 1 elements. The use of flash on the for the candidate finder is unfortunate that page should really be accessible to everyone.
• Candidate Info: 4.5. The bio is a little sparse.
• Web2.0: 4. Twitter, facebook. Their site looks the most web 2.0.
• Donation: 5. The most straightforward process of them all.

Conservatives – 90%

• Design: 4. Decent overall. Some weird layout and graphic choices. 
• UI: 4.5. Dropdown menus are familiar, nice series of quicklinks on the right nav. 
• Candidate Info: 4.5. Has everything I could want except for his mailing address.
• Web2.0: 5. They’re on the ball, flickr account, friend feed, twitter, myspace, facebook. And all their ads are online. 
• Contributions: 4.5. Giant donation buttons everywhere. They’re already required to collect a lot of info already, they could have at least made it a one step process. 

Green – 76%

• Design: 4. Pretty good. Albeit a little uninspired and sloppy. Probably designed by a volunteer.
• UI: 4.5. Bonus marks for using a drilldown information structure and NOT using dropdown menus.
• Candidate Info: 4. Long Bio. No mailing address.
• Web2.0: 2.5. They have blogs and a youtube channel.
• Contributions: 4. Nice and easy.

Liberal – 52%

• Design: 3.5. Simple. Just a little too simple. Too much white. 
• UI: 3. Use of flash on the index for something that could’ve been easily done in javascript was a bad choice. Other than that, it’s pretty run of the mill. 
• Candidate Info: 0! No picture! No personal contact info! No permalink. Unacceptable. 
• Web2.0: 3.5. Facebook, youtube, some video and pictures. Seems like an afterthought. 
• Contributions: 3. The page is quite cluttered and a little confusing. The page contains elements outside of the secured site, causing a certificate error that will probably scare of some potential contributors. 

Bloc Québécois – 47.5%

• Design: 2.5. Looks like puke, but it could be worse.
• UI: 3. Mediocre. 
• Candidate Info: N/A. They only run candidates in Quebec.
• Web2.0: 1. They have a “blogue” I guess that’s worth something.
• Contributions: 3. The online form is only available in french (isn’t that against some law?!). It appears to be pretty straightforward.

Libertarian – 23%

• Design: 0. My 7 month old son could design a better site. 
• UI: 3. It’s oldschool, but effective.
• Candidate Info: N/A. None in my riding.
• Web2.0: 0.5. They have a forum *shrug*.
• Contributions: N/A. I think they’re still too small to be accepting donations on a large scale. 

 
There you have it, if you want to vote based on my opinion of the party’s website, you’ll have to vote NDP.
I took a look at the rest of the minor parties for any standouts. The Canadian Action Party has a surprisingly good website. The West Block Party‘s site is easily the worst, it has an under construction diggerman.