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{ 2009 02 19 }

ChangeTracker: Tracking changes at White House web sites so you don’t have to

ChangeTracker is a little tool that updates an RSS feed, emails, and tweets when pages change at whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov. It’s also the first project of my internship at ProPublica! Woot!

@changetracker on Twitter
@changetracker on Twitter

We put to together a bit of tricky internet plumbing and massaging of the tubes. ChangeTracker tweets, emails and feeds an RSS that links to pages at Versionista (a totally awesome tool, previously blogged about) that show left-right diffs of the page changed.

versionista

Versionista co-founder Peter Bray used Versionista to highlight position changes on Barack Obama’s campaign web site.

And we’re giving away the code! So it’s dead-simple for anyone to copy our work and set up change trackers for any web site.

Needless to say, it fills me with joy that I work at such a badass non-profit newsroom.

Posted by bboyer on Thursday, February 19, 2009, at 12:16 pm. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

Comments

  1. Brad | February 19, 2009 at 3:08 pm | Permalink

    I was just thinking yesterday that somebody should set up something like this on Facebook’s Terms of Service….

  2. Brian Boyer | February 19, 2009 at 3:59 pm | Permalink

    For sure. Though the folks at creative commons point out that the real problem with Facebook’s terms of service is not that it changed, but that it’s not human-readable: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12778

  3. Chris Amico | February 19, 2009 at 5:36 pm | Permalink

    Should have seen your fingerprints on that. Nice work.

  4. Brian Boyer | February 19, 2009 at 6:38 pm | Permalink

    Thanks, Chris!

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