Just Build Something

The Political Web

About a month ago, JT Smith suggested that we should all stop talking about Perl and just build something. And, purely coincidentally, over the last few weeks I resurrected a project that I have been poking at for about five years and have finally turned it into something that I’m happy to show the world.

The Political Web is a site which aggregates all of the information I can find on the web about individual British MPs. I say “all of the information”, but that’s obviously a bit of a work in progress. But I think that what I already have is useful and interesting – well, for people who are interested in British politics. I have plans to bring in more information in the future.

Although I’ve been working on the site for five years, I pretty much rebuilt it from scratch when I recently returned to it. Actually getting something useful up and running took about four hours. That’s because I was building it using Perl and, more specifically, Dancer.

3 thoughts on “Just Build Something

  1. Dave, I had seen your post on the dancer forum a few months back. Recently I was having a brainstorming session with members of a local volunteer group who run a campaign called smartvote.in (http://smartvote.in) There was some interest in replicating what you have done with http://politicalweb.org.uk Before reinventing the wheel I wanted to check whether you would be interested in open sourcing your code.

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