Political Smokeout

Those Rounds websites

UPDATE: This morning, as I predicted below, the roundsforsenate.com website went live.

Among the first public tipoffs that Mike Rounds was considering a Senate run was when aide Rob Sjonsberg registered two Internet domain names, roundsforsenate.com and roundsforsouthdakota.com.

With Rounds expected to announce a Senate candidacy tomorrow, I checked back on those websites to see if there was anything there.

There’s no actual websites there. But there is a filler page from a Parallels website manager software. I can’t remember for certain if that was there before, but I seem to remember a default GoDaddy placeholder page. The Parallels filler suggests someone has been using Parallels Plesk Panel to work on the website.

Roundsforsouthdakota.com now redirects to roundsforsenate.com. I don’t recall this being the case; it used to have a standalone placeholder page, I think.

Google turns up some interesting results inside a /test directory. Visiting roundsforsenate.com/test gives a “forbidden” error, while visiting roundsforsenate.com/tests, or a string of random gibberish, turns up a “not found” error.

So someone has clearly been working on these websites.

I ran a utility on the domain for all the robot-readable pages inside the website. There are a handful, all in the /test directory. You can read that here.

Bottom line: Either I am incompetent at memory/understanding the Internet (very possible!) or someone has been preparing a website at roundsforsenate.com to go live tomorrow.

How to search this site

A bit of tech support here. Most of you, like me, have probably had difficulties with the fact that the search functions on argusleader.com and this blog seem non-functional.

To help that, a while ago I added some of my most common topics to the sidebar so you can click on them and see all the posts about them.

But here’s another workaround you can use here, on argusleader.com, or on any site on the web.

1. Go to Google.
2. Type in your search in question. Don’t hit search.
3. Following (or before, it doesn’t matter) the search, type the following string: “site:argusleader.com” or “site:politicalsmokeout.tumblr.com” or “site:sdsos.gov” or whatever. You don’t need the quotation marks.
4. Search. Your results will be confined to that particular domain.

Our texting governor

Like Cory Heidelberger, I was struck to learn that Gov. Dennis Daugaard is a big user of text messages to communicate with his family and staff.

That revelation was among the interesting things I included in my profile of Daugaard’s inner circle of advisers in Sunday’s paper.

The disclose came almost by accident. I was talking to the Governor’s Executive Committe (or “GECo” as they call it) members about the governor’s process for gathering information before making a decision.

Tony Venhuizen mentioned how if the governor is in Pierre, he’ll usually meet with him at least once or twice in person on any given day, sometimes much more. That caused Lt. Gov. Matt Michels to add his two cents.

“You say meet. Today, I shot him three emails and one text. Those had to deal with the National Guard,” Michels said.

I stopped things there.

“We have a texting governor?” I asked

“Oh yeah,” replied Deb Bowman.

The governor confirmed this story when I talked with him later, explaining that his kids helped get him into texting and that he still uses correct grammar, spelling and punctuation in his texts. (I do, too, in emails, texts and instant messages. Spending my teenage years heavily IMing in complete sentences probably did more than anything to develop my high-speed typing skills.)

Here’s the relevant section of the article:

The governor also peppers his advisers with requests throughout the day. Whether in his office or traveling, Daugaard always has his Android smartphone at hand to send emails and text messages back and forth with his staff.

Daugaard said his children introduced him to text messaging.

“Texting is really very helpful, especially when you’re in a noisy environment or you’re in a meeting and you can’t take a call but can take a sneak peak at a text — if you can do that politely.”

But even as a texting governor, Daugaard hasn’t bent to some of the conventions of the medium.

“I should learn the abbreviation lingo, but old habits die hard,” he said. “I still punctuate and capitalize.”