Although it’s true that basically no media outlets bother to mention bill numbers when writing about legislation, I really have to give credit to the always-vital Capital News Service, run by Jeff South at the VCU School of Mass Communication. Every one of their articles about legislation provide bill numbers for every single bill that […]
Category Archives: Tech
Memo to Virginia journalists.
Please start including bill numbers in your coverage of legislation. If you did that, then Richmond Sunlight would promote your coverage of that bill, prominently, on that bill’s page, as well as on pages about related bills. Media coverage is the only major component of the information ecosystem that simply can’t be incorporated into this […]
AMBER Alert API?
Why is there no API for Virginia’s AMBER Alert system? I should be able to have all of my websites query their system every hour and, when an alert is found, display the content of the alert on every page on every site. Heck, I’d write a WordPress plugin so that anybody could easily deploy […]
Richmond Sunlight’s JSON API.
I’ve just released v1.0 of the Richmond Sunlight API. It’s JSON-based, simple, and straightforward. This turns Richmond Sunlight into a web-based service that allows any application or website to get data about the General Assembly automatically and basically seamlessly. The most exciting bit, I think, is the Photosynthesis API. Now any individual or organization can […]
The unstructured structure of the Code of Virginia.
The structure of § 1-401 of the Code of Virginia is broken down into five sections: A, B, C, D, and E. The structure of § 1-402 is broken down into nine sections: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Why two entirely different schemas? I have no idea. I’m starting to […]
Virginia Laws.
I’ve been working on this for the last few months. There’s really nothing to see just yet, but, as when I was developing Richmond Sunlight, I think it’s better for me to spend time coding than bloviating. I just spent twenty minutes writing about the Delaware Senate race, realized that I’d said nothing original or […]
The Senate killed a bill to put their own voting records online. So I did it for them.
The Senate Rules Committee killed a bill today that would have put legislators’ voting records online. The House passed freshman Republican Jim LeMunyon’s HB778 overwhelmingly. But the Senate Rules Committee—overwhelmingly Democratic, incidentally—barely allowed it out of subcommittee, and then killed it on a 13-2 vote. Officially, they think it’d just be too darned hard to […]
General Assembly Twitter aggregator.
Here’s a fun new Richmond Sunlight feature: a Twitter aggregator. At a glance, see what the General Assembly is talking about.
Sen. Hurt is, in fact, the most partisan member of the senate.
I just finished adding a new feature to Richmond Sunlight—the ability to sort through legislators by a variety of attributes like location, race, sex, year they started in office, etc.—and when I was done, I found a bug. For some reason, my code was listing Sen. Robert Hurt as the most partisan Republican in the […]
Steve Shannon’s special IP addresses.
Steve Shannon ran this ad in the last month of his campaign: If those IP addresses are an indicator of Steve Shannon’s technical prowess, I don’t think he was going to catch those child pornographers after all. Here’s a screenshot, if you missed it: This is a bit like tracking Virginia criminals by their phone […]