May 11th, 2010 | by Derek Willis | published in Car Tools, XML
It’s true that Excel has been a decreasing part of my toolkit for several years now, and that I never quite had the love for it that I do for various database managers. But I’m guessing that’s the exception, not the rule, in the broader journalism community. So when it came time to propose a [...]
June 28th, 2005 | by Derek Willis | published in Python, XML
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 [...]
April 29th, 2005 | by Derek Willis | published in Python, XML
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 [...]
April 8th, 2005 | by Derek Willis | published in Miscellany, XML
I’ve moved a couple of things around in the interior of the site to take advantage of WordPress’ Pages feature, and in doing so I needed to re-work the Projects section and its various sub-sections. For the very few (besides me) who have been subscribing to the RSS feed of Federal Election Commission news releases, [...]
February 23rd, 2005 | by Derek Willis | published in Car Tools, XML
Mark Schaver has a great walk-through for reporters on using RSS to help follow your beat. It shows how to set up RSS feeds of Yahoo! search results.