One of the first things I did at 18F was work with a few others to migrate our blog from Tumblr and build the whole site, with Jekyll, on our servers. We wanted to ensure our readers were getting high quality content and that it’s served to them in a consistent, stable, and trustable environment. About a year and a half later, we’re taking a second look at 18f.gsa.gov. We want this site to be an exemplar of what 18F can do for partner agencies. One way to do that is to host it the way we’d host a similar site for a partner agency, and that means moving to Federalist.

The Federalist platform

As we wrote in September, Federalist is “glue that ties a lot of already-existing platforms together.” We built Federalist in house to provide federal clients with a robust experience for hosting very simple websites like the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, Not Alone, the 2015 USEITI report, and College Scorecard. All of those sites are 18F projects, all of them are hosted on Federalist, and all of them are very similar to this website: content-heavy sites with a relatively straightforward underlying web framework.

Federalist more or less abstracts a lot of tech away from us, allowing us to focus on the writing, editing, and designing of the site. It also comes with some excellent features we’ve wanted for a long time, and a team dedicated to maintaining and improving the platform going forward.

Tradeoffs of moving to Federalist

We don’t currently have a reliable way of previewing the post before publication. Now, we can get a rough idea by looking at the markdown on GitHub, but we don’t know how it will look on our site until we merge a pull request to the staging branch. With Federalist, we get a preview URL for every post, which should simplify our publishing process.

One major tradeoff of moving to Federalist is losing the ability to implement new standards. On Blue Beanie Day 2015, we announced 18f.gsa.gov was running HTTP/2, the latest and greatest (and fastest) HTTP there is. We won’t be able to do that until CloudFront supports HTTP/2.

Despite our site not being able to implement this standard, the upshot is that once we can, every site on Federalist can (and maybe even every site on cloud.gov). This is an example of the network effect we can be part of by using Federalist. Every time we add new sites to the platform, find a bug or help implement a feature like HTTP/2, the other sites benefit from that work. In the meantime, our users can still browse our site securely by default.

We’ll explain more about how Federalist works, and how we’re building 18f.gsa.gov, in greater technical detail in future posts. For now, know that 18f.gsa.gov is served the same as many of our partner agency sites.