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 Community Q&A 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 our recommendation. No sooner did we recommend #usbill that people started tweeting with it.
- Pages for bills now show industry supporters and opponents thanks to MAPLight.org, 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 Filibusted.us which has more information on the issue of filibusters.
- You can now jump to a congressional distristrct by entering a street address, 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.
