February 23rd, 2010 | by Derek | published in Python
As part of our roll-out of version 3 of the NYT Congress API, I was tasked with coming up with a sample application that uses the API to do something mildly interesting, or at least functional. I had gotten a book on Google App Engine for my birthday and was pretty excited to see that [...]
January 24th, 2010 | by Derek | published in Mapping, Python, django
Update: Simon has updated his library to make it easy to reverse the order of coordinates. Thanks!
For a “15-minute project“, Simon Willison’s geocoders library is pretty handy if you’re doing geocoding with Python. It offers a common interface to the geocoding services provided by Google, Yahoo and other sources. When we were looking at replacing [...]
November 25th, 2009 | by Derek | published in Python, django
I haven’t mentioned Fumblerooski in awhile, but rest assured that work continues, especially during college football season. I’ve added more coaching information (still a long ways to go on that, though) and will be unveiling player rankings soon. But the biggest thing I’ve done lately has nothing to do with new features. Instead, as I’ve [...]
March 1st, 2009 | by Derek | published in Python
So we’ve got this Congress API at The Times, which already has spawned a Ruby shell by Patrick Ewing (a shell being a really neat idea, as well as useful in building apps). I decided to try and get my feet wet with writing a Python library to interact with the API, too, and the [...]
May 20th, 2008 | by Derek | published in Campaign Finance, Python
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 [...]