Status Report: Monday, September 28th, 2009

[bouvard]

Hey everyone,

A brief note to let everyone know that the latest prototype for a
web interface for Voter's Daily is now online at:

http://dev2.mashupkeyword.com/2009-09-23
(the date is just an example that has significant data, feel free to
test some others)

Thanks again to Chauncey for allowing us to host the test site on
his server. Although this incarnation is still very rough around the
edges, it is getting somewhat close to what I had envisioned as far as
a presentation metaphor goes. (You are welcome to suggest that the
metaphor is wildly off the mark.)

Developing this interface was always a long-term goal of the
project, however, it became a short-term necessity when I discovered
just how difficult it was to format the dataset without seeing it
displayed in an end-user-appropriate format. As I anticipated, having
it properly displayed has revealed myriad bugs, oddities, and nits
with how the title and description fields are formatted. With the
site in place I will now be proceeding to open a couple dozen bugs as
we attempt to coax the data into the headline/body metaphor that was
the original intention (and which is necessary for it to the data to
be intelligible when displayed).

As a for instance:

title: "Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2009"
description: "Roll Call # 731 H R 3617 - On Motion to Suspend the
Rules and Pass (P)"

Will become something like:

title: "Passed: Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2009"
description: "Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2009 (H R 3617)
was passed on Roll Call Vote #731 by a vote of X to Y."

Work continues. Comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Chris