KildareStreet news

April 2009

28 April 2009

And now also the Seanad

About 45 edits to garbage in the Oireachtas source XML and about nine hours of extra coding later, I'm pleased to announce that we now also have every word uttered in the Seanad since January 20th, 2004.

Senators have detail pages just like TDs, and you can follow them in the search engine, RSS, email updates, and all that just like you can with the Dáil.

Enjoy!

-- John Handelaar

Posted at 21:15:00 | Link to this

22 April 2009

First-day alterations

Welcome new viewers - six hundred-odd people have turned up in our first four hours to have a look!

Sod's law would dictate that there was a substantial government reshuffle today among the ranks of the junior ministers. I've just made all the necessary alterations to those people's records.

-- John Handelaar

Posted at 23:44:24 | Link to this

14 April 2009

Welcome to our beta test

Hello all, and thank you for helping to road test KildareStreet.com.

Please contact us with your feedback, or you can just add your comments to this blog.

We want to know everything: what you like, what you hate, what works, what's broken, what could we do better. The lot. Don't hold back.

Posted at 20:44:24 | Link to this

14 April 2009

What we know isn't working yet on Kildarestreet.com

This entry's for those of you testing the beta. I know that the following things are currently problematic or missing and will need repairing or implementing, respectively:

1. The search engine, which we inherited from the UK, is currently having character set issues which manifest themselves on people and items using characters which appear in the Irish language.
2. 'Numerology' on TD info pages is currently devoid of information despite the software's ability to generate many statistics calculated from members' contributions.
3. Speeches which contain inline quotes from external sources should show those quotes as indented paragraphs; they don't yet.
4. Written answers to questions from the record are not here yet. We'll be adding them as soon as we can.
5. Currently nothing at all very little is in the Seanad database.
6. If the answer to a question contains a table of data, that table is omitted, and any text from the answer which should appear after that missing table is also absent.
7. Brian Cowen, for example, is not only one of the local TDs from Laois-Offaly. We have the ability to display offices and opposition spokesperson roles but haven't yet imported that data. Ministers are in, opposition parties not.
8. I remain on an ongoing seek-and-destroy mission looking for the seemingly endless references dotted around the place to the Commons, Lords, Hansard and MPs.
9. The API needs reworking accordingly before it can be used by anybody, and in any case is currently still lacking its geographic functions.

A number of these future fixes will require me to re-import the whole day's proceedings. If by bad luck you happen upon a day which is in the process of being regenerated, it will look very odd for up to fifteen minutes. So please hold off on reporting that unless it stays broken for more than 20 minutes.

If you find an issue which is not contained in this list, please file a bug report!

Thanks for helping.

John Handelaar

Posted at 20:34:24 | Link to this