It's been a good first week here at FOSS. After spending a couple days getting everything set up with my computer (git, TurboGears, fedorahosted, etc etc), I started working on making a demo of the kind of widgets CIVX could use to display information, particularly for the New York state senate.

I've been playing around with a jQuery tabs widget that's pretty sleek looking. After some struggling to get that working in TurboGears, I think it looks good so far, and will be really awesome once I learn more about the scraper APIs and can actually fill it with useful information. I also put a basic calendar widget (more jQuery magic) in one of the tabs that will eventually track events by senator. I made a little more progress on this today by learning to make the calendar actually do something when a date is selected... kind of important, I guess. ;)

Another bit of jQuery that I started trying out today is the "accordion" style tabs. A version of it is already in use on the CIVX websites and I have so say, that is one nifty effect. I made a version of my demo with accordion instead of normal tabs, and although I think the latter is more aesthetically pleasing, both will be very useful to this project.

Aside from all this, I've been spending a lot of time reading up on the various technologies used here (I'm woefully uneducated on all the things TurboGears is capable of), and checking out what CIVX has already done, to try to get up to speed. I've also looked at similar sites like OpenCongress to see what's already in place and hopefully glean some inspiration. So far this has been quite a horizon-expanding experience, as I'm used to being purely a back- end programmer, and I'm excited to continue on a high note next week.