Liberal Democrats: Flock Together

Following the last, not wholly successful, attempt at a training video for Flock Together, here’s a new attempt using Flash.

The (free) programme that let me do this is called Wink and it’s proved surprisingly easy to use, and has produced dramatically better results than my last attempt. Its only slight negative is a mild Pinky-and-Perky-isation of my voice!

A hat tip to Mark Pack for getting Flock Together into the Guardian.

Exciting stuff on TheyWorkForYou.com with the launch of their new API.

This is all free to non-profit-making sites and thus lets Flock Together (as a decidedly non-profit-making site) access all kinds of information when users input a postcode, such as the constituency the postcode refers to and the MP that goes with that constituency.

Now to work out exactly what to do with the opportunities this represents! Obvious ideas include:

• Mapping users into their constituencies
• Automatically assigning meetings and by-elections to the constituencies they are held in

But I’ve got some even cooler ideas than that - particularly when one starts mashing up constituency information, Google Maps, Google News and Prater Raines website feeds!

Lots to think about…

In response to requests, I’ve added some options for personal Flock Together RSS feeds.

The basic feed remains, as before:

http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/userrss.php?id=yourusername

If you want to publish your feed, it may make sense only to show only meetings that you’ve ‘registered’ on Flock Together. To do this add the following onto your URL:

&registeredonly=yes

To sort the meetings in order of reverse appearance (i.e. the most ‘recent’ post will be the most immediate upcoming meeting), add:

&sortorder=meetingdate

If you want to show your feed on a Prater Raines site, then the best option is just to add the following to your URL:

&praterraines=yes

Finally, to set the publish date to the meeting date (which may break some feedreaders, since the publish date will be in the future), just add:

&scheduleddate=yes

There’s been an encouraging uptake of the personal RSS feed system that I’ve just installed - 37 different people so far.

My feed is http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/userrss.php?id=mpntod for example. Just change the user name on the end (the bit in italics) to get your own personal feed. If you log in to the site, the RSS icon at the bottom of the home page should also link to your personal feed.

I had a request for the feed to be sortable by date by using use the date of the meeting as the publication date. This may confuse your feed reader since some of them don’t show dates in the future, and it will mean that updates don’t show as you might expect, but if you want this, add ‘&scheduleddate=yes‘ to the end of your feed address.

I am also thinking of adding a ‘&praterraines=yes‘ flag to format the entries so that they look good on Prater Raines sites. In essence, this will mean removing the date from the meeting title and changing the publication date to the date of the meeting. Worth doing? Let me know.

Postnote: the ‘praterraines’ flag is now installed and working.