Political Spectrum Viewer
From GovTrack.us Wiki
Contents |
Live
Stable
filter by party, house
searchable for particular representatives
zoomable/scrollable
Photo/govtrack page link
In Development
formatable
show rank order
move viewable area when finding off screen person
Bugs
Open Issues
We need to figure out how to get it to fit in a smaller size. Small fonts don't seem to be particularly readable. Replacing names with just state (for senators) and state+district (for reps) might help. Or, replacing people with little dots. Until the user zooms in. [different name formats don't seem to help very much. I'll think on this one]
Ideas
maybe popups with photos of representatives, use/compare different data sources, use/compare with data filters, score or rank view, etc.
Comments
When positioning the names (nice job, btw), you can give some flexibility in the horizontal position chosen to make the names fit better. [what do you mean by this?] The names don't really fit compactly, especially on the edges where you get strange looking overhangs. Well, so I should ask, how are you positioning each name? [Basically, I'm attempting to put the name on the bottom row, if there's a collision, I try up a row. If there's another collision I try up another row. etc. It's more optimized than that, but that's the effect.]
Fixed
I don't think the user needs to customize the gap or text size/font. [yeah, that's a half baked idea but it's useful for developing to see what looks good]
[Fixed] You probably know already, one person's name is a bit garbled --- the file with the data needs to be read in UTF-8 encoding (unless I messed up the file, or I could change its encoding).
[Fixed]"Representatives" (i.e. the delegates) should be collapsed with House members. Senators and Representatives should be the category names.
What are you using the Sunlight API for? (I may have the info statically anyway.) [picture, contact info/page, congresspedia page, official site] For pictures, you can use the URL directly http://www.govtrack.us/data/photos/400017-50px.jpeg where 400017 is an id, and 50 can also be 100 or 200. And then, for links, I'd rather it just linked to the person page on GovTrack. (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/person.xpd?id=400017)
