A little project that I started a year ago now has been eating up a lot of my time, especially in the past eight months or so. I decided that, as Richmond Sunlight improves the display of legislation, I should create a new site to improve the display of the state code. It could hardly …
Category Archives: Tech
Creating an API for the commonwealth.
In perhaps a misguided effort, I started work a few months ago to create a site to round up all of the APIs for government data in Virginia. That inglorious website is Open Virginia. It’s easy to catalog all of them, because right now, I know of exactly two: Richmond Sunlight’s legislative API and my …
McDonnell on open government.
Gov. McDonnell, on open government: “I’ve long been an advocate of putting our full budget, all our legislation, a number of things about state government online in an easy to download, easy to access fashion,” the governor said. Really? I mean, if that’s true, that’s great, but it’s news to me. If there has been …
Commenting bug fixed.
A few people have complained that they write a comment here, and it’s denied with a “comments are closed” message. Which must be infuriating, having invested time in writing something, and then having it be lost to the ether. I’ve eliminated the plugin that I was using to prevent spam, and now I’m fighting spam …
Bigger textareas mean longer comments.
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 …
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 …