Status Report: Monday, September 14th, 2009

[bouvard]

First off, sorry if updates have been slow for the past couple weeks.
There was a serious illness in my family followed by scheduled sort-of-
kind-of vacation this last week, with only working Tuesday last week.
Things should get rolling more steady work now that my life is
returning to its regularly scheduled programming.

Despite being on vacation I did sneak in a few commits and I am happy
to say that I think I have nailed down the CouchDB list functions that
will be generating the JSON, ICAL, and HTML responses (the latter is
primarily for debugging). Also,the API url schema and the content of
the those data formats is solidifying.

The latest development code has been imported onto Chauncey's VPS and
is available for anyone to look at. For those of you familiar with
CouchDB you can browse to the Futon interface at the following url:

http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com:5984/_utils/database.html?vd_events

From there you can see that we are now code-generating views for each
branch, each entity, and each scraper to facilitate queries and
debugging.

For those of you who aren't CouchDB wizards, I invite you to take a
look at the output for a few sample queries.

*All Executive branch events from September 1 through September 14th
(inclusive).
JSON: http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/api/events/branch/Executive?start="2009-09-01"&end="2009-09-15"
iCal: http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/api/events/branch/Executive?start="2009-09-01"&end="2009-09-15"&format=ical
Debug HTML: http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/api/events/branch/Executive?start="2009-09-01"&end="2009-09-15"&format=html

(Hint! Try importing the iCal file into Google Calendar! ;-)

* Today's Senate events (not there are a couple erroneous House events
in this dataset--they have been ticketed)
JSON: http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/api/events/entity/Senate?start="2009-09-14"&end="2009-09-15"
ICAL: http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/api/events/entity/Senate?start="2009-09-14"&end="2009-09-15"&format=ical
Debug HTML: http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/api/events/entity/Senate?start="2009-09-14"&end="2009-09-15"&format=html

There remains data integrity work to be done and some important issues
remain open on the tracker (http://github.com/bouvard/votersdaily/
issues), however, I think we are getting very close to being ready to
do a public launch. More on this as I get our hosting details nailed
down.

Keep watching this space,
Cheers,
Chris

PS: For those who are interested in such things, http://www.jsonlint.com/
and http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/ were invaluable in
validating the output of my list functions.