If you’ve been here before August, you surely have noticed already the most obvious recent change. But besides the visual refresh, there are a number of new things here at GovTrack, and more planned. Read on for details.

Equilibrium movie download

This month GovTrack hits its four-year anniversary. It’s been an incredible four years. Really. When I first rolled out the site in 2004, after around three years of on-and-off development, I didn’t know if anyone was going to want to use it. I thought the “selling point” was merely email updates, but I had no idea that the project would turn into something a bit bigger. Today the site is viewed by around 15,000 people a day and sends out 1,000 email updates a night, but it is also a data provider to neat sites like MAPLight.org and Follow The Oil Money which track the correlations of campaign contributions and votes and themiddleclass.org, an advocacy organization. Through the site, I have also gotten into government data policy and am making small inroads in improving how our government publishes raw data. Most recently, I have been lucky to have been joined by others in the task of improving GovTrack, as the site moves further in the direction of being a community project.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over trailer

Here are the recent changes to the site:

• The appearance! Thanks to Dan Gabriele, the site now looks pretty professional, I would say. We are going to roll out another set of visual updates next month.
• Community Question and Answer: You can now find on bill pages a box to enter questions about the bill, and to see what questions other GovTrack users have posted. Then you can answer them. It’s a community effort to research legislation and help others get the facts. Take a look at the list of recent questions and answers and see if you can answer any (possibly by putting your research hat on). It’s a civic good deed. Since the feature was added at the end of June, 373 question and 235 answers have been posted. We will expand on this tool in the future.
• You can now look up your congressional district and Members of Congress by a ZIP or ZIP+4 postal code. (Thanks to public.resource.org for the data!)
• I have written a page on Tips for Commnicating With Congress Choke hd . Should you write your rep? What should you include? Take a look.
• Votes pages

  Battle for Haditha

  now include some cute pie charts, and, also, the time of day when the vote happened, in case you’re doing some deep research.

• Pages for representatives now show a little map The Wild Thornberrys Movie full Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman dvd
  
  The Count of Monte Cristo movie download
  Amazing Journeys download

  for their congressional district and a listing of the counties and towns in the district. See this example.

• Bills pages now show related pages based on what GovTrack users have selected as trackers. You have to go to the Related Bills page for a bill. See this example. This will help you find legislation that has superseded the bill you are looking at, for instance.
• The feed and bill status widgets that you can embed on your webpage (which by the way we had first) can now be customized easier.

And for developers:

The Rainmaker movie download
• There is a new Get Involved page.
• The congressional district look-up API now supports lat/long, addresses, ZIP codes, and ZIP+4 codes. You may not know about the three other APIs either: see the source page.

9 full But much more is in the works. We’ll be completely overhauling our bill text page for easier navigation and comparison of bill text and to let you link directly from your website to particular paragraphs within bills, and to embed paragraphs in widgets on your own website — to help you make your case in your own writings. We’ll also be expanding and improving on the statistics we generate for Members of Congress, providing a new set of “indicators” to get the big picture on what your rep is actually doing. Lastly we hope to integrate some campaign contribution data to get another perspective.