Kudos to the Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills
I’ve been working with Mark Horrell and Steph Gray at DIUS over the last couple of months to improve TellThemWhatYouThink’s support for their consultations.
It has been a splendid experience. DIUS’s consultations are now provided in an XML feed — lovely, structured ATOM goodness with custom elements galore, available to all. DIUS are the first (hopefully of many!) to provide their data in such a useful format, for which they deserve some serious kudos.
Not all has gone perfectly, though. I discovered that the library I was using to parse this feed did not understand custom ATOM elements at all, and as a result, the consultations appearing on the site were pretty garbled. I’ve fixed the problem now, but the consultations I had gathered before today were pretty messed up, so I’ve removed them from the site. The consultations which were currently live were gathered from the ATOM feed — correctly, this time — during the scrape last night and are now all present and correct. Apologies to anyone who got a duplicate email alert or who was inconvenienced by the sudden loss of content!
Thanks very much to Justin Kerr-Stevens for meeting me, to the Open Rights Group for the hook-up, and to Mark & Steph for all their work.
