A while back I created feeds for every TD in the country. Well, now myself and the amazing Rob Synnott have created a handy aggregator for all these details. It’s called Politics In Ireland. It updates twice a day. Maybe it’ll update more frequently the closer it gets to the election. I hope this compliments the already great politics sites that are out there.
The front page lists results for all TDs. But to give users even more choice you can also view results for just the TD themselves, or everyone in their party or everyone in the constituency they’re in.
You don’t even have to visit the website if you don’t want to as every section has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.
And there’s more. You can also display the results on your blog or website using a simple bit of javascript like below:
<script src="http://politicsinireland.com/getjs/">
</script>
<script>
do_pii_box();
</script>
More examples here. Working sidebar feed on Rob’s blog.
Simply replace the id number (172 in this case) with the id number of the page you want to display. For all results just leave the id blank.
Please do remember that the site is in Beta so think of it as this: PoliticsInIrelandBETA.png)
More features will be added in the future as we have time and resources. We hope you find it useful. Feedback will be greatly appreciated. I’d like to thank John Breslin for creating the site logo and massive thanks to Rob for putting in a huge amount of work and for being very patient with my whims and requests. You rock Rob!
[…] Myself and Damien Mulley have just released an Irish politics news aggregator. His idea, I wrote and host it. It allows you to see posts about specified parties, constituencies and TDs; you can also get RSS feeds for any given subject, and get a Javascript thing to put on your website, if you so wish. It currently uses a PlanetPlanet theme, but a custom-written backend. It’s written with mod_python, if you’re interested […]
Fantastic! I suspect I’ll find it invaluable in the coming months. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance: How does it know when a post relates to Irish politics?
I’d guess by scanning for keywords… no? http://www.mulley.net/2006/07/29/wanted-coder-for-quick-project-worth-e50
Hmmm, that logo is *very* familiar, isn’t it?
Thanks Kevin.
Georgie: That project I advertised for is something else. Think along the lines of this: http://www.mulley.net/2006/06/26/rss-feeds-for-every-td-thanks-technorati/
Dave:
Those technorati feeds cited as links to the names of the TDs won’t be as relevant as feeds derived from Zenark’s database of crawled news. If Politics In Ireland.com updates on results of Technorati alone, you’re going to need to find better eyes to ensure the raw info actually relates to Irish politics. For that to happen, I’d look under the bonnet at what Zenark does if only because all the political parties do.
There’s an anti-spam feature built in so non-politics related results get removed. Zenark we ain’t. PoliticsInIreland is a non-commercial public service. Will Zenark be releasing a public aggregator Bernie?
Let’s see if we can get some Zenark web intelligence to pump up your watchlist without upsetting the politicians who pay to watch other politicians.
Cool! Smaller version of the logo at http://www.johnbreslin.com/temp/politicsinireland_small.jpg
Thanks John! Rob’s updated the logo now.
Very cool! You will of course be providing an OPML file of all feeds for inclusion in the Open Irish Directory?
Will it take feeds from the news papers? Local and national
From newspapers which already have feeds, yes, shortly. A few which are listed on technorati are already displayed; you’ll see a few Irish Times (‘ireland.com’) articles.
James, currently, no RSS feeds are used, so OPML would have no obvious application.
Damien, I have just come across this now and it looks excellent.
Rob there is ways of making feeds from sites that have no feeds. We do it over on Irish Election for some of the parties. Takes a bit of work but the adding the local papers would be cool
I’d be very cautious of scraping newspapers’ sites. I suppose it’s a possibility, but it could potentially make them very unhappy.
true. but if it is just linking to their sites and directing traffic their way what harm?
“James, currently, no RSS feeds are used, so OPML would have no obvious application.”
I don’t follow Rob. As Damien says everys section has an RSS feed so what I’m asking for is a bundling of those feeds into OPML nodes and subnodes.
Oh, oops, sorry, yes. Can do at some point.
Good work Damien / Rob. Nice to be able to get all the election bullshit all in one place. Nice site
Good work.
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What’s the latest on your local TD?…
Ever wondered if your local TD has a blog or what people are saying about them. Damien Mulley has a great site about Irish Politics that tracks all of our TD’s blogs.
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