Lately we have been trying to both put a swanky new theme on the CIVX website as well as wrap up the person dashboard. While Rebecca has been doing an amazing job on the former, I have been working on the latter. I ran into a few snags earlier last week when I experienced the results of not pulling from the repository often enough (note to self: don't do that again) and had problems merging my code with the large amount that had been committed since I last pulled.

With that lesson learned, I got back to trying to get all the tabs dynamically. With bills and actions working properly, my next target is contact information. I was able to scrape most of the senator's addresses using the world's most hideous regular expression and BeautifulSoup. That's about when I hit another issue, in that the NY senate's website HTML is so inconsistent that not even a 300 character regex could capture every senator's info.

The ideal solution to this is an improvement to the Open Legislation API so using BeautifulSoup isn't necessary, and I've submitted a request, but for now this is the best I can manage. This week I will hopefully find a workaround to save me from having to pull an ever greater regex hack.