newsweek:

maxistentialist:

ThinkProgress misattributed my “Cavalrymen for Romney” site to the Obama Campaign, and now there’s a lot of conspiracy theorists on Twitter including Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who think the site suggests that Obama planned that line.

For the record, this site had nothing to do with the Obama campaign. I voluntarily linked it to the President’s website, because that’s a good resource for learning about his policies.

I definitely made the site quickly, but I didn’t have any advance knowledge of what would happen in the debate. When I heard Obama’s line about horses and bayonets, I thought about how funny those things would be as special interests (big horse), and that gave me the idea for the site. Once I had the idea, it only took me about ten minutes to launch it, and it was online well before the debate was over.

Here’s how I did it:

• I grabbed the first big Google Image search result for “cavalry” that was on a white background
• I copy/pasted the Romney logo onto his pike and mocked up the “learn more” button
• I exported my images and coded the site by hand in HTML and CSS… my TextExpander snippets let me assemble a site like that very, very quickly
• To eliminate domain name propagation time, I purchased the domain from my registrar (Gandi.net) and set it to redirect with a mask to a subdomain on my site

In case there was any confusion about where that Cavalrymen for Romney website came from, its creator offers an explanation.

TL;DR: No, it wasn’t the Obama campaign.