It just occurred to me that with some 500 people per day viewing GovTrack’s homepage, and since I don’t post site news all that often, maybe others would like to join me and blog legislation-related news and information (like I used to do in 2006) on the front page of the site? If you’re interested, drop me an email at the address at the bottom of the site.

Totally not useful to anyone, but I thought I’d share— I’m confirmed attendee #9 to a conference in December, and #10 is a hero of mine, to the extent I have any heroes. Can’t wait.

Just added a new feature: high-resolution district maps that can be downloaded (and printed), with no unreasonable copyright restrictions. To get the maps, find the district map, as on this page, and look below the map for download options. The downloadable maps use street data from The Open Planning Project, which is (incredibly) made available with the only restriction that if you copy the map, you provide credit back to them. Since we add the district outline overlay here, to copy these maps you have to credit both GovTrack and TOPP.

Check it out. Someone makes a video praising GovTrack.

GovTrack has moved over to its new hardware so things should be working normally again. More or less.

Sunlight has posted a really nice review of GovTrack. If you’re not sure how to start using this site, the review highlights one path.

If you’ve used GovTrack at all lately, you’ve probably noticed the chronic outages that have grown considerably worse over the last few months as traffic has increased (with some 8,000 people visiting daily now). There have been a few independent problems. One was a software bug (it wasn’t my fault!) that I believe I fixed today, and so the outages should pretty much clear up. Another issue was that the machine running this site simply couldn’t keep up with all of the new traffic, and so today I’ve bought a newer and faster server. Over the next few weeks I’ll move the site to its new home, and hopefully you won’t notice the change, except that everything will hopefully be speedier by the time Congress returns from its summer break.

Actually, I do expect that there will be a week when accounts on this site will be locked — you won’t be able to log in and add or remove monitors or change email settings. Apologies in advance for that.

GovTrack has had a few widgets that you can embed on your website to show tracked events or the status of bills, and, for developers, now it’s possible to use the Google Maps congressional district overlays on your own Google Maps mash-ups. There’s also a REST API for searching legislation. Details here.

This month, the 30,000th user created an account on this site!

A few site updates to mention: First, I’ve created a new Presidential Candidates page for those candidates that have served in Congress, which is actually most. You can see how they line up in political leanings as I’ve sorted them based on their position in GovTrack’s Political Spectrum.

The representative statistics page has been updated to go back a few more years, and the political spectrum has been updated for the 110th Congress.

I’ve also added some download options at the top-right of the main Votes page (which is a relatively new page, btw) and on the pages for individual roll call votes so that you can import the data into Excel (CSV format) or use it for other applications (XML format).

Stay tuned: Major news from the Open House Project in one week.