The Scoop

The Federal Election Commission does a good job with its datasets, in general, but its website leaves a lot to be desired. Things are posted in various places on an inconsistent schedule, basically whenever the good folks at the FEC are able to do it. So if you wanted to keep track of the FEC’s News Releases, for example, you’d be headed back to that page repeatedly. Until now, that is.

As a first foray into producing RSS feeds for Web sites that do not have them but need them, I’ve put together a Python script that scrapes the FEC News Releases page and assembles a primitive but working .91 RSS feed (it validates, too). The feed is produced by a cron job, meaning that it runs at set times during the day – currently I have it generating a new file each morning but I’ll probably switch to twice a day. So, subscribe to the feed if you like, and keep watching – I’ll be building more of these feeds for other government sites. Send your suggestions my way.

Update: I’ve changed the feed name to fecnews.rss (the links above reflect that).