Obama sends secret love to geeks

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You would expect to see Obama branding in every aspect of the Obama Victory Fund website. But the web developers at President Obama's campaign have taken it a step further, creating the Obama “O” campaign insignia in the source code of the website — the sort of thing only dedicated hackers and data nerds could love — or, for that matter, bother to suss out.

A screenshot of the Obama source code:

Obama source code

Known as ASCII art, the “O” is made from characters and spaces, serving no functionality other than appeal to geeks.

The Easter egg has generated attention in some circles. A picture of the Obama source code is posted on Flickr and has been noticed on a number of blogs including logo design love, which notes that Tumblr also uses ascii art in its source code.

Another example of innovative use of source code inside the Beltway: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which recently got some publicity for its tech chops, uses its source code to cleverly target advertising for certain kinds of jobs.

CFPB source code