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For some time now I’ve been interested in the possibility of bringing together political information from all different layers of government and finding ways of layering it. Too few of us understand where the key decisions on the issues that concern or affect us are taken. Action at a local level can be a very powerful political tool it’s hard to find out which level is most appropriate, or to trace how issues move between layers. Unfortunately it can seem even harder to find well-structured data at more local levels than it is on a national level. ...

After returning from a weekend away, updating my apps to the latest Edge Rails, and running my test suite I started spotting new deprecation warnings: DEPRECATION WARNING: assert_flash_exists is deprecated and will be removed from Rails 2.0 DEPRECATION WARNING: assert_flash_has is deprecated and will be removed from Rails 2.0 Kevin Clark has posted on the deprecation of assert_tag in favour of assert_select, but I’ve yet to see any notes on this one. Looking in the actionpack CHANGELOG there’s no reference to the change, and there’s no documentation in the new home of those methods (actionpack/lib/actioncontroller/assertions/deprecated_assertions.rb) to suggest what we should use instead other perhaps than making use of the code used in those methods. eg: ...

For anyone who might be wondering, I have been meaning to blog about Greenbelt. It’s just that with over 3000 photos on flickr, 18 or so videos on youtube, and dozens of blog entries, there’s been plenty of Greenbelt content to distract me from adding my own here. Tags: greenbelt2006, flickr, youtube, technorati

The good people at mySociety have been discussing the API they’ve opened up for They Work For You. They also have a few examples of how the API might be applied. Best of them, and possibly the best API demo I’ve seen, is a text adventure run over telnet. Entering a UK postcode will select an MP for you, and you have to guide that MP to Tony Blair’s Sedgefield constituency, doing battle with any opposing MPs you pass along the way, and eventually fight the PM himself. ...

On Tuesday the Center for Digital Government announced that Michigan.gov had won its annual “Best of the Web” award. You can see the state’s press release here. The site has introduced a number of useful new features over the past year. If it weren’t for their recent addition of news feeds I probably would have missed this story, and quite a few others, and their efforts to improve accessibility, and unify public facing services are to be applauded. But the fact that they won the award is a sign of the poor state of governmental websites in the United States. ...

Back from Greenbelt last night, I spent some time this morning trying out flickr’s new support for ‘geotagging’ by placing all my photos on a map. The interface is nice and hopefully as the API is updated and more uses for the geodata emerge, more and more users will geotag their photos. I’m imagining a map of the Greenbelt site that lets visitors see photos based on when and where on the site they were taken, opening up all sorts of navigational possibilities. ...

The first lyrics to grab my attention during a first listen to Lamchop’s new album Damaged were from the beautiful, sprawling first track, Paperback Bible: i have always thought That handguns were made for shooting people Rather than for sport Why not use a rifle in most other applications? You might find a rifle or a musket But you’ll never hear a pistol There may always be Someone looking for or finding some ...

One of the projects demonstrated by Andy Turner at BarCamp Grand Rapids was Mapufacture. Developed by Andy, with Guilhem Vellut and Mikel Maron, the site functions as an RSS aggregator with a difference. As well as pulling in the latest content from feeds, it also extracts GeoRSS data from those feeds and plots the results on a google map. You can read an announcement here. Mapufacture is one of a number of apps that are demonstrating one of the key ways that I hope the web is going to move on from the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon, showing how open data can begin to be leveraged using tools designed for average users. Open APIs are all well and good, but it’s only as their potential is opened up to non-traditional users that I think we’ll really begin to see the potential. ...

Little Miss Sunshine feels like a more mainstream sibling of films from last year like The Squid And The Whale and Me and You and Everyone We Know and unsurprisingly given the film’s wider distribution it doesn’t have the same psychological weight, deadpan humour, or dysfunction as those films. That may be just as well as several parents seemed to have chosen the film’s title above its ‘R’ rating and brought small children along to see it. Hopefully those children were able to enjoy the soundtrack—so well put together by DeVotchKa—and ignore the less appropriate scenes and language. ...

Jeremy Kemper has just checked in a change to Edge Rails that fixes my biggest frustration with has_many :through. Since it’s appearance a couple of versions back, has_many :through has been a great addition to the rails associations toolkit, making the use of join models infinitely cleaner. But until recently it was rather cumbersome to create those relationships. For example, if I wanted to add an author to a book where the relationship is defined as: ...