This is a project I’ve been working on over the last year.
In addition to combining data from multiple federal sources into a single UI, I built a 2,500+ rule regex-based parser / pseudo state machine that classifies every legislative action into discrete states and stages. This makes it possible to generate a day-by-day timeline of what happened to every bill over the last 50 years, and a graph showing how many (and which) bills occupy each major legislative state at any point in time. In total, 1,555,069 actions are parsed into 1,157 unique enums across 41 stages.
I also fully re-parsed the official bill text XML into a modern format and recreated the large bill-text XLS styling system in CSS, which dramatically improves load times and (to my knowledge) is the first near-complete recreation of that XLS styling in CSS.
Hope you find it interesting :)
slwvx•2h ago
Is the data not as easy to parse prior to 1975? Or why did you stop there?
What else would you like to do with this? Are there other filters you would like to add? Do you like the UI?
itta_e_ta•2h ago
I’d like to have full coverage eventually. A complete Executive Order history exists via the UCSB American Presidency Project, but for now I’ve only uploaded what’s available from the Federal Register.
My next focus is adding donations and net-worth data to legislator pages. After that I’d like to add some form of commenting and voting to make the site more interactive around currently in progress legislation.
This is actually my second attempt at the UI :) I like it, but I’m definitely biased and have lost track of what may be confusing to new users. Open to any feedback!
slwvx•1h ago
I noticed two things immediately about the UI: the complete absence of rounded rects [1] (which seem to be everywhere, except HN), and the embeded windows (e.g. for Executive orders) with their own scroll bars and window controls. These two things different than my (not-so-educated) view of the rest of the web and took me a second to get used to.
I hope you continue to improve the site!
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
itta_e_ta•1h ago
I once worked with a design lead who had a rule about no rounded borders so maybe that rubbed off on me for better or worse. Fun link on the history of it :)