Someone makes a video praising GovTrack. 
Site status
GovTrack has moved over to its new hardware so things should be working normally again. More or less.
August 9, 2007
Sunlight review of GovTrack
Sunlight has posted . If you’re not sure how to start using this site, the review highlights one path.
August 8, 2007
Site outages and status
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.
July 28, 2007
Widgets for your website (and two APIs)
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.
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April 29, 2007
Site Updates: New Presidential Page and More
A few site updates to mention: First, I’ve created a new 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
.
The
page has been updated to go back a few more years, and the
has been updated for the 110th Congress.
I’ve also added some download options at the top-right of the main 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.
March 31, 2007
What's happening with transparency?
Not much. The Democrats have had three months and so far we’ve seen no significant progress in transparency. Paul Blumenthal over at Sunlight .
In other news, the is in the final steps of assembling our report for Speaker Pelosi. I’ve written up two sections, one recommending that the legislative database powering THOMAS be opened up, and the other recommending the House establish a permanent “thing” to tackle transparency & technology issues in the long term.
February 22, 2007
New Search Feature
If you use the special , you can now search previous Congresses: just add a slash and the Congress number, like H.R. 1828/108 or accountability/107
.
January 6, 2007
New Features!
Check out these new features on GovTrack:
- The full text of bills is
and highlights the changes made to the text during its legislative history, such as due to amendments and substitutions.
- The now show a recent voting history, an ideology meter, and pages for senators show their constituent approval rating.
- The
page now shows 80 major subject categories to help find interesting subjects.
- There is a new page for
but the membership information has not yet been updated for the 110th Congress.
- The
monitor can now be tracked with an iCal feed.
With all of these new features, GovTrack will be pretty much on auto-pilot until the summer.