Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Texas capitol does RSS feeds

Outstanding! The Texas capitol website now has RSS feeds so the public can track key information like bill texts and meeting times through a regular old RSS reader. Here's what they've got so far:
This is just great. You can also create customized bill and meeting alerts, or even look up information on your PDA or cell phone.

The Texas capitol website has become an amazing, wonderful public resource. You really don't need to be in Austin anymore to track the Lege pretty darn closely. I listened to the Sunset hearing today on my computer, for example, while I worked on other things and just blogged the interesting tidbits (see below).

Congrats to the site's designers and the folks updating it constantly - your work is having an amazing democratizing effect on Texas government.

2 comments:

Writer said...

Since I'm new to State stuff, I thought these were always part of the site. I agree, it makes keeping track of things much easier.

Gritsforbreakfast said...

The RSS feeds weren't there last year, though I think there was a less sophisticated version of the bill alerts. Lobbyists pay a pretty penny for private web-based Lege-tracking services like Telicon, but the capitol site these days is nearly as good, free and available for everyone. We're lucky to have it.