Benjy 06 Dec 05

We can view votes by astrological sign? What’s next, favorite color?

What actually would be useful/interesting given the culture wars arising, would be to see the vote breakdown by religious affiliation.

Alex Bosworth 06 Dec 05

lamest RSS feed ever

title is “Yes” or “no” body is “Question: On Passage of the Bill. Barack Obama voted No”

Cameron Fleming 06 Dec 05

Just a follow-up: They Work For You has individual RSS feeds for each MP too, including every time the MP speaks in the House of Commons.

Kyle 06 Dec 05

What I think is interesting, above and beyond the RSS feeds, is the revealing of Projects subdomain on the WashPost url. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I wonder if it, combined with recent job adverts (a few months ago, I believe) for people with XHTML/CSS and J2EE and/or RoR experience and understanding means that the Post is going to start aggressively using the projects subdomain to start a beta type section on their site.

Sounds cool, if it’s the case. Oh, and I imagine we can expect mashups to occur fairly soon with this tool.

p.s. Great to have the comments back on the site!

Wes Garrison 06 Dec 05

Yeah, what’s the point of seeing what they voted if they don’t include any meaningful information about the issue? Nice, but no thanks.

Florisla 07 Dec 05

Web-enabled democracy is nice. Check out www.theyworkforyou.com , they’ve been making publicly funded work public for a long time in the UK.

Adrian Holovaty 07 Dec 05

To the folks who complained about the RSS feeds lacking enough information: I’ve fixed that. Thanks again for the feedback.

Bob Aman 07 Dec 05

Neat. I wrote something almost exactly like this for a project about, oh… almost three years ago, but as a Java Swing app (and obviously, without the RSS feeds, which is probably what makes this thing interesting). Their implementation is a lot more polished than mine, but with not quite as much information. I had full text of bills, every single attribute of your representatives you might possibly want to know (religion, educational history, military service, previous civic service, marital status, age, affiliations, etc. — you could group information by most of those fields) and we went all the way back to the first congress in what, 1789? Full text of bills went back to 1996 I think. Had graphical visualizations for votes superimposed on the map of the United States. Senate votes were pretty boring though since the state would always show up in red, green, or white, instead of some gradient in between. Our user interface sucked.

Course, we were shamelessly copying other people’s data, mostly from the lexus nexus, so we trashed the whole thing when we had gotten our grade.

Learned a bunch of things from the project. Namely, most bills are utterly inane. “Motion to waive bill on requiring airline toilet seats,” etc. Most bills are also utterly incomprehensible. Full text of some random bill: “Section 1a. Ammend section 4, paragraph 3, of previous bill to read ‘must not’ instead of ‘should not.’” And there’s also a metric crapton of bills for naming governmental buildings after dead people.

In any case, I really like what Adrian’s doing with this. Can’t wait to see how it turns out. And yeah, I’m totally subscribed to Obama’s feed, even though I’m from New York. I like him a lot. He talks a really good talk. Wish he wasn’t quite so consistent about voting down the party line.

swithin 17 Dec 05

Most RSS feeds I’m familiar with end in SomeFileName.xml. The feeds from the Washington Post are files that both IE and Firefox ask me to save to disk. This doesn’t work too well in the Trillian Pro RSS plug-in I have. Know of any tricks other than using another RSS utility?

Todd Jones 10 Mar 06

This site sucks big weiner