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.


Posted

in

by

Comments

3 responses to “Just Build Something”

  1. JT Avatar
    JT

    Woot! Way to go Dave!

  2. vijayvithal Avatar

    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.

    1. Dave Cross Avatar

      Hi,

      If you look at the about page on The Political Web, you’ll see that the code is already open source. There’s also a link to the Github repository.

      So feel free to do what you want with my code. But please let me know what you’ve done.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.