Here's a list of new things going on at VoterSpeak...
- Latest bug fixes, typographical errors and general oops
are listed here.
- Limited RSS feeds are available.
Topic- or state-specific RSS feeds of Google news stories are available from the main
Voterspeak page or from most of the Phase I state-level sites.
Tell us what you think!
- The Letter Wizard continues to grow and inspire
PDF saves, Letter/Envelop DOC versions and a new spell checking system
have been added to the Letter Generation Project, not to mention a
spiffy new style guide.
In addition, a new navigation system is being tried out (the rollover
menu on the left side vs. the old graphic/image-map approach...)
Tell us what you think!
- A Phoenix from the ashes...
As previously reported, the VoterSpeak server has been restored and with its
recovery came a renewed sense of urgency to finish the
original driver behind the Voterspeak site. We
are therefore pleased to announce the (very) Beta Version of
the Letter Generation Project.
Your
comments, suggestions and feedback
are very much welcome.
- Crash and Burn!
During the week of April 15-22, the VoterSpeak server suffered a multiple
hardware failure which required a new power supply, main drive and network
adapter. As a result of the crash, the entire VoterSpeak site has to be
recovered. As of 4/22/05, the main site and core databases are online but individual state
sites (VS Initiative) and the main VoterSpeak forums are off-line.
The forums have been restored as of February 7, 2005. However, we
may not fully restore them (and instead possibly drop them altogether)
due to low usage. There is some talk of spending that effort on RSS development.
Your
feedback
on this is welcome.
Latest:
The States Initiative section is backup, though the mini forums are still down. The
design group has made progress on the LPG project, watch for new announcements.
- States not included in the
VoterSpeak State Initiative now have slightly more useful pages (basic
state page includes news sources, links into the Congressional database, etc.
Previously, they had a very terse "This state not included" page that,
while accurate, was far from friendly or useful.
- An incredibly useful (3,000+!) set of
news sites (mostly newspapers) has
been submitted and included into the references database.
(Thanks Kondor!) However, some of the links are dead and others will
come and go, so we've added an automatic link verification component to
the database. On a weekly basis, every link will be checked to see if
it is still live. Ones that are unavailable will be marked as inactive.
The links won't be active (clickable) in the reports but will continue
to be listed for 30 days. After 30 days, the link will
no longer be listed but we'll keep it in the database so, should it
come back alive at some later point, it will be caught/reactiveated
by the weekly checks.
Also, because we now have way more links than
we can possibly handle manually, these links will open up a new browser
window when clicked and, since we've no idea what kind of site we may be
opening up, there is now an exit page that indicates the selected page is "external"
to VoterSpeak. Finally, because the bibliography list was too extensive (Thanks, K),
we've added a "preview" option that only shows the first five news sources.
- A Congressional quiz was
written to test the Congressional database but we got a little silly
with "option D" entries so we decided to leave it up for the general public.
- U.S. Congressional data has been obtained and is being loaded in
into the VoterSpeak database engine. A sample of the dataset is available
here. The full dataset is still being loaded and error-checking
volunteers are encouraged to test it out!
- Mini-forums have been made available to test states as part of the
the VoterSpeak States Initiative (VSI). Mini-forums are public
posting boards with less functionality than the VoterSpeak
Forums. Mini-forums allow anyone to post without registering but the
postings are automatically removed after one week. While there is
limited searching and automatic topic generation,
mini-forums don't offer other features (edits, smileys, quoting
previous posts, etc.)
Sample states with miniforums include:
Alaska,
Kansas,
Michigan and
North Dakota.
To try them out, please visit one of these VSI homepages and look for
the special "mini-forums" link below the state banner. As always, we
welcome your feedback on these new features.
- The
U.S
Senate Mailing List has been added to the VoterSpeak databases.
(2/19)
This is part of the data/zipcode collection for the
Letter
Generation project but the new code retrieves the data directly
from the Senate's web site, so we're hopeful it will automatically
update in future years. (We're all about self-sustaining databases,
can you tell? They're cheap and, given our budget, so are we!)
We'll have more updates and make this available Very Soon Now,
at both the national and
state levels.
- The VoterSpeak Forums are now online!
The forum section of the website is online thanks to a nice
piece of "bulletin board" code we found on the net. Supported functions include
automatic registration, password checking, lost password administration, polls
and a slew of bells and whistles, ranging from smileys to avatars. Oh yeah,
there are some thought-provoking questions about democracy, too....if you are
into that sorta thing.
- The VoterSpeak States Initiative has completed Phase One!
The VoterSpeak States Initiative is designed to encourage participation at the state
level by bringing up a VoterSpeak web-site for individual states. Patterned after the
national VoterSpeak site, state-level sites will provide forums, local news and
legislative information as well as the opportunity to write letters to state-level
representatives. The current progress chart for the VoterSpeak States Initiative as
of February, 2005 is available here.
-
Privacy policy
As several of you have pointed out, the privacy policy is in seriously
bad shape. We have someone working on repairing (ok, re-writing) it.
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