OpenCongress Upgrade

OpenCongress releases 13 new features that allow you to more efficiently track your federal legislators. Have fun and remember to vote early and often.

Still handy after all these years

TidBITS finds hand-coding HTML still gets great favor from Web developers:

It’s therefore rather amusing to recognize that after 14 years of such editors – FrontPage, PageMill, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and many others, with few surviving the hecatomb – hand coding still rises to the top as the preferred method of building pages. Khoi Vinh, design director at The New York Times, noted in a recent reader Q&A segment on the Web site, “It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to ‘hand code’ everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.” (GoLive, by the way, bit the dust today.)

Admittedly, I’ve relied on the nifty WYSIWYG editor for posts to NTFHT, but it does feel a bit cheap. So perhaps I’ll get back into the swing of things with hand-coding. (via @PatrickRuffini)

Free Radiohead or What You Will …

In the tradition of local/indie theater groups across America (or at least in Berkeley and Austin), Radiohead is offering its latest set of goods at the pay-what-you-will price. I’m tempted to pay loads more for this than I would for most choice CDs at Amoeba.

More fun with Google Maps

Gawker has used the power of Google Maps to create the New York City Subway Smell Map. Its reader-based ratings have given us such descriptions as “asscake death venom animal carcass” and “cow shit.” Interactive and snappy, it’s worth a moment of your time.

Google Transit

New — to me — from Google Labs is Google Transit, which allows you to map out the most expedient route between two points in a city … via mass transit. I’m frighteningly excited about this feature, especially given the fact that it’s not yet available in the Bay Area.

People-powered press

The Huffington Post is teaming up with NewAssignment.net to recruit “citizen journalists” — yep, just like you — who will be assigned to blog on the major presidential candidates in the 2008 election cycle. From the announcement:

We’ve seen what happens when the reportorial elite begins feeding off the same informational teat, and conventional wisdom becomes the order of the day (Exhibit A is, and will always be, the press’ shameful lack of questioning during the run-up to the war in Iraq). We’ve also seen what happens when members of an online community band together to pursue a story, as Josh Marshall’s did recently with the U.S. Attorneys scandal.

Applying an open-source philosophy to national political coverage could be just the shot in the arm that mainstream media needs (via TechPresident).

AppleTV

Apple releases its new InterLace Teleputer … er, AppleTV.

Shitty bum

Though I still haven’t found a reasonable way to buy a copy of C-Mon & Kypski’s “Shitty Bum” since hearing their 2005 SXSW performance, I can at least console myself with the video’s availability on YouTube.

Bandwagon

Never one to pass up an opportunity to plug for someone else, I’m jumping on the bandwagon.

iWant iPhone

http://www.apple.com/iphone/