The Scoop

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 [...]

For one of our Django applications at work we received a request to add iCal feeds to accompany the RSS feeds available for each candidate’s page (example here). I first thought about doing this using a hard-coded template, the way described in March on boomby.com. So I did and it worked - the directions are [...]

While watching the Florida-Florida State football game on Saturday, it occurred to me that the Gators seem to get quite a few delay of game penalties, maybe more than other teams. But how to check that theory? Try Python and ESPN’s site, which provides detailed play-by-play logs for games in a nicely consistent syntax. I [...]

Thanks to the magic of Python and MySQL I’ve put together an RSS 2.0 feed of today’s Federal Election Commission electronic filings. It’s updated hourly between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m. via a cron job, and you can find the script on my FEC Electronic Filings page. Subscribers are welcomed. Other RSS feeds may be [...]

Let’s face it, relational database types don’t like XML files. They’re structured, sure, but not in quite the way we’re used to. So pulling them apart is a chore for which there are many tools but few that seem to fit easily into the CAR mindset. Enter Python and the Amara toolkit. Amara builds on [...]