Idea: RSS Services for Government Info
I subscribe to a GovInfo.gov RSS Feed for U.S. Bills.
It looks like this:
If I visit the website, it's entirely different, too.
I would like to use my news scraper software (FOSS library) to basically scrape this feed and build better main-pages.
I want to see:
- Bill Name
- Bill Summary
- Bill Sponsors (with their party & state)
- Actions on the bill
- Bill Text
- Links to other services: Lookup your rep, legiscan, u.s. congress page for the bill, etc
Such a feed may already exist, but I did not find one I was very happy with when I looked awhile ago.
I just want staying up-to-date to be a bit more streamlined. Having to click through different links and scroll around to find this info just makes it a lot less smooth.
My potential approach
The easiest approach for me is probably to scrape the govinfo RSS feed, download the pages that list the PDF | XML | TEXT links, and download the TEXT link.
The I could build a new feed with the content I want. An early version would likely just show the original RSS page title & then the bill text. It would be one less click, and it would be formatted for a webpage, so it could be an improvement over the current setup, while also being extremely low-effort to implement.
Other approaches could include loading the full web-page from govinfo & parsing that, or using the legiscan API to get bills, or maybe another website or service.
But before coding any of that, i should probably shop around a little more for a similar feed that already does this.
Footnote
I started developing a service to provide RSS feeds for all of my local outlets (there's probably 5-9 of interest). There would be a unified feed of all of them, a feed for each of them, category-feeds available (probably), and a curated feed available (ideally).
The curated feed would involve going through all articles & adding stories of interest to a new feed, ideally through my website with a simple drag-drop ui.