Here’s what’s been happening with the site this summer:
- We’ve upgraded our hardware to top-of-the-line equipment so that we can keep up with the increasing number of visitors coming to GovTrack.
- I’ve hired a moderator (my first staff member!) to process the submissions to the section of the site. A long backlog of submissions awaiting approval built up while I was on vacation — hopefully never again. This also frees up my time for other things.
- We’re now recommending Twitter hashtags like #usbill and #hr3200 for bills. See . No sooner did we recommend #usbill that people started
.
- Pages for bills now show industry supporters and opponents thanks to , and for enacted bills now show who was president and signed it. Cosponsors are now shown in bold if you are tracking them.
- Pages for cloture votes now link to which has more information on the issue of filibusters.
- You can now jump to a congressional distristrct by , and if you hover your mouse over a congressional district on the maps page it tells you which district it is above the map.
- You now don’t have to create a new account on GovTrack to store your trackers or get email updates. You can log in using your Google, OpenID, or some other existing logins you may already have.
- Various small mistakes were fixed: California is now listed as having 54 districts, not 53, on the maps page.
- The bill text pages should load faster now for long bills.
- Pages for Members of Congress now show their latest tweets, if they are on Twitter.