Since I couldn’t find a list of twitter feeds from the US Congress, I made one today.<\/p>\n
Now you can get a snap-shot of our legislators highest priorities, as captured in 140 characters at a time, at twitter.com\/CongressBirdie\/legislators<\/a>.<\/p>\n In case you’re curious how I did it without painstakingly searching each congressperson’s name and username to add to my list by hand, I’ll let you in on my little my secret: I relied heavily on a few open source projects to automate the process. To find the Twitter IDs, I simply looked them up from the very excellent Github project unitedstates\/congress-legislators<\/a>. Then I used the Python Twitter Tools<\/a> module to chat with the Twitter API<\/a> to create the list and add all the legislators in bulk.<\/p>\n Life wasn’t exactly as easy as all that, though. I had to make a little tweaks in order to gather all the tweets. First, there is an easy-to-fix bug in the Python Twitter Tools package. You need to make sure it knows how to POST to lists\/members\/create_all<\/a> command. Right now employs a GET request—and that doesn’t work. It looks like at least one other person has run into the same problem. If you run into the problem, you can read how I fixed it<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Twitter didn’t handle my create_all request as they promised. The documentation claims you can add up to 100 users to your list at a time, but that wasn’t my experience. Instead, I could only get the API to add legislators 25 at a time. But that’s a small price to pay for democracy.<\/p>\n And this list is active! In the time it took me to write this post, the list reported 13 new tweets. Your tax dollars hard at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since I couldn’t find a list of twitter feeds from the US Congress, I made one today. Now you can get a snap-shot of our legislators highest priorities, as captured in 140 characters at a time, at twitter.com\/CongressBirdie\/legislators. In case … Continue reading