Posted by
Daniel Haran on
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/elections-canada-tp814p848.html
Russell, did you get any reply for your 2005 letter?
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/1060Oh, and you've been doing amazing work on this. Thanks.
On 2/3/07, Russell McOrmond <
[hidden email]> wrote:
> The Lobby module for Drupal has a screen scraper in it, but because
> of changes on government sites it would need to be tweaked to work. It
> uses the
> "
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/PostalCode.asp?Language=E&txtPostalCode="
> script, which doesn't often work during elections.
>
http://drupal.org/project/lobbyNice. I just had a browse at the souce; looks like parl.gc is easier
to access than the elections.ca website. Still, what a mess of HTML
(that's more a sign of incompetence than malice though).
Given the number of possible postal codes, it would take 14 days and 2
hours to try each one if trying one per second. Gives us plenty of
time before the next election, I should think :)
Technically, rather than keeping this kind of module in drupal, it
seems to me that this should live as a web-service. The database
wouldn't have to be complete for it to become useful, since missing
postal codes could be dynamically fetched. Opening up the web service
for non-profits and keeping the requests to a trickle should be
consistent with the elections.ca TOS (I couldn't find anything for
parl.gc.ca).
Does that sound reasonable? Are there any NGO's that would use this?
d.