FEC News Script Returns from Oblivion
May 20th, 2008 | Published in Campaign Finance, Python | 5 Comments
Ages ago I released a simple Python script to generate an RSS feed from the Federal Election Commission’s press releases. Well, it’s 2008 and there’s still no official RSS feed, so I’m updating the script and using it as a launchpad for a suite of Python utilities for working with FEC data. In the future I’ll be adding files for downloading and processing electronic filings and other FEC-related information. The whole thing will be available at github.
May 25th, 2008 at 3:07 pm (#)
Not to freak you out or anything, but I am following you on github. I keep a lot of my work stuff there, but I’m also starting move in woodshopping materials. My mission for the summer is to learn some Processing with Ben Fry’s new book. You’ve inspired me to published whatever crap I come up with on there as well.
May 25th, 2008 at 6:32 pm (#)
Cool – glad to have you along, man. Where’s your github location?
May 28th, 2008 at 6:46 am (#)
I’m at github/palewire.
I forked your fec-utilities tonight and put in a little time out in the woodshop. I tried to build out your filings scrape, break the RSS creation independent of the news function so it could serve both scrapes, and then upgrade it to RSS 2.0. They passed validation tests after I pulled the trigger, but I’m up pretty late over here so something is probably off.
http://github.com/palewire/fec-utilities/tree/master/fec.py
May 28th, 2008 at 8:19 am (#)
Sweet! Looks great to me. I’m going to be adding some other stuff later tonight, I hope.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:43 pm (#)
Cool. Anything else I can pitch in on? I had fun last night. I don’t get to do contribs much anymore, so it’s nice to feel like I’m back in the game.
On the same tip, I’ve got a quick and dirty homebrew pull-and-parse on the new zip files of lobby filings put up by SOPR. Maybe we should open source that.