Here’s an update to what’s new on GovTrack over the last few months.

• You’ll now notice little buttons throughout the site that let you add or remove trackers when you see lists of bills, rather than having to click through to the individual bills.
• The bill search page now lets you search bills by references (i.e. citations) to the United States Code.
• You can now search GovTrack for historical Members of Congress and can browse Members of Congress by year.
• We’ve improved the way we notice changes to bill status so that the automatic processes that make GovTrack go keep the site better up to made.
• The images that go along with roll call votes have been made to look just a bit nicer.
• The congressional district maps can now be expanded into a full screen mode.
• When you are tracking individual bills, you’ll now get updates when cosponsorship changes.
• Logging into GovTrack was totally broken if you entered your email address with any capital letters. This is fixed now. Oops.

For developers reusing GovTrack data for other projects:

• We’ve now got MODS files for bill text from the GPO, which, among other things, includes the dates bill texts were published (something annoyingly missing up till now).
• I’ve been filling in the “class” field for Senators. This determines which election cycles each senator is in, and when one senator replaces another you should trace it back through the same “class”. I haven’t checked it carefully for accuracy yet. Additionally, we now have two people.xml files, one for current Members of Congress and one for the historical data that has everyone that has ever served in Congress.
• Bill XML files now have some new experimental status codes that more precisely reflect where a bill is in the legislative process.

that House Republicans are explaining their views on the health care bill by linking people directly to the paragraphs in the bills they find important. I think that’s great. They may be using OpenCongress, but we invented that feature over here on GovTrack — OpenCongress is based on GovTrack — so we’ll take some pride and credit too.

Here’s what Donny wrote:

Here’s a great example of the kind of textually-informed conversations about bills we have been trying to encourage. Republicans in the House of Representatives are extracting chunks of legislative text from the OpenCongress health care bill page (), giving their take and opening them up for discussion. They’re using OpenCongress’ bill text permalinking tool to refer people back to the specific lines of text in the 1,990 page bill that they’re talking about.Check it out —

They’re using a service called that lets you “clip, share and discuss interesting things you read on the web.” It integrates with Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.

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I just set up an account quickly and was able to leave a comment on one of

. Then I was able to easily . The whole process is open, transparent and social.

Having the links back to the exact portion of the bill under discussion make it engaging. It’s easy to be disingenuous about legislation by making a false claim and backing it up with a line of text taken out of context. That’s basically how the “death panel” myth was spread over the summer. But providing a link to the specific line within the bill invites people to look it up for themselves, read it in context and make their own judgement.

Anyways,

. They’re putting up several new posts per hour.

I’m a wonk, you’re a wonk. We like reading legislation and we’re proud of it. Strut your stuff with .

About a month ago I started a . With a $100 prize at stake, about a dozen people submitted ideas — three submitted shirt-ready images. Congrats to who stole the prize for his satirical design:

I Know What You Did Last Session

(For the older readers, this is a reference to a horror movie.)

submitted some new logo images, based on the site’s current logo. In appreciation, I decided post-hoc to add a runner-up prize of $60 for Ben. Ben’s submissions are on t-shirts and a mouse pad. Here’s the mouse pad:

GovTrack Logo Mouse Pad

Finally, submitted a cute red G with an eye inside, which I turned into a mug:

Thanks to all of the submitters!

I also added a design myself. It’s an image of a bill, the House’s health care bill, and on the back is the page with the supposed dead panels, which are clearly not mentioned on that page.

The merchandise is . It’s all created, managed, and shipped through a third-party website that does this sort of stuff — Zazzle.com. I just upload the designs.

Now, I didn’t do this to make money so all of the merchandise are available at the lowest rate that Zazzle.com will let me sell them for. But, people have asked me how to donate to GovTrack and I’ve always declined donations in the past (GovTrack is NOT an actual non-profit charitable organization), but if you want to support the site, you can also buy the same merchandise at a marked-up price. You choose.

Here’s what’s been happening with the site this summer:

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• 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
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  .

• 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.