At the bottom of every bill on Richmond Sunlight is a comment form, with a textarea for typing a message and a few text input fields for name, URL, and e-mail address. On January 30, I significantly increased the size of the textarea, making it more than twice as large in area. My theory was …
Category Archives: Tech
How I OCR hundreds of hours of video.
One of the features that I’m most pleased with on Richmond Sunlight is the integration of video. It’s one thing to put up chunks of video for people to paw through, but it’s another to automatically index it so that people can be directed to just the parts of the video that interest them. That …
Legislative video sponsorships.
Richmond Sunlight has no video of the legislature for a single day of the 2010 session, since the site a) doesn’t have a budget and b) I didn’t raise any money. So, this year, I’m soliciting sponsors for every day’s video. The average day’s House and Senate video requires buying $18 worth of DVDs from …
How Instapaper works.
Marco Arment on how Instapaper works: The bookmarklet has a mechanism to save pages from sites that require logins for full content, such as the Wall Street Journal and Harper’s, by sending a copy of the page’s HTML from the customer’s browser to the server. It’s like automating the “Save as…” menu item: if you …
CNS does it right.
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “The unstructured structure of the Code of Virginia.”
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 …