know-thy-congressman

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This repository contains the unabridged source code for know-thy-congressman.com, a web-service/bookmarklet that displays beaucoup information about your elected representatives.

Let me briefly describe the nature of the beast: When you click on the KTC bookmarklet, you load in all the Javascript, CSS, and Javascript Templates needed to render the eventual display. A search request for the given legislator is sent to the server, where, if the politician's information is not yet cached in the database, it is split out into many different requests for each of the supporting APIs, requested in parallel to a certain degree, and then merged back into one large JSON data dump. The politician's JSON gets cached in the database, and the result is returned to the bookmarklet, which handles the parsing and graphing in Javascript to display the information on the screen.

Notable Methods:

• Services.dig_up_dirt (in lib/services.rb) The main API querying method. Threads out requests to each of the APIs.

• Services::Base#safe_request (in lib/services/base.rb) Accepts a block that executes a request, and ensures that any momentary API downtime doesn't screw up the big picture.

• Politician#information (in app/models/politician.rb) Accessing the information dump about a politician performs a search if the information has gone stale.

• KTC.Loader (in public/javascripts/know-thy-congressman.js) has some interesting methods for loading cross-domain css and javascripts in a browser compatible fashion, even when JQuery has not yet been loaded.

• KTC.Grapher.visualize (in public/javascripts/know-thy-congressman.js) is a messy ol' method, but is able to handle the canvas-based graphing of several types of information: earmarks, votes, and favorite words.

• KTC.Util.reloadCss (in public/javascripts/know-thy-congressman.js) is a nice debugging bookmarklet to refresh all of the CSS on the page, without needing to reload it.

• KTC.Politician.INFO_TO_DISPLAY (in public/javascripts/know-thy-congressman.js) is the constant that determines the layout, ordering, and data binding of the final display, and makes it simple to try out different arrangements.