On Wednesday evening we pushed out a few new updates to the CllrTweeps website. The most obvious of which is a new layout for the list of councils. As the number of councils on the list has grown, we felt it was becoming more and more difficult to track down the one you were after. To make things easier, we’ve split the list into alphabetical sections, and provided links to allow you to jump to a particular letter.
We’ve also taken the opportunity to tidy up the naming scheme for the councils. For example “Amber Valley BC” is now “Amber Valley Borough Council”, and “Barnet” is now “London Borough of Barnet”. This change has meant that the URLs for individual council pages have changed, however the old pages should automatically redirect to the new ones. We think we caught them all, but if you find a broken link please let us know!
Council Type Filters
As well as changing the names of the councils to reflect their type, we’ve introduced a ‘council type’ filter. By clicking on the filter, you can now reduce the list to show just Parish Councils or Unitary Authorities.
We’re working on some other filters to help you find your local council, and will be introducing those over the next month or two.
Aggregated Twitter Feeds
This is one of the upgrades I’m most excited about – the introduction of aggregated Twitter feeds. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed for individual councils and see all the tweets posted by members. We’re using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all the tweets and supply the feed.
The service is currently in beta, so there might be a few bugs we haven’t ironed out yet, but hopefully it should be stable. For now, if you are using a browser that supports feed auto-detection, you should see an RSS icon in or next to the address bar. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making the feeds more obvious on each council page, and also making them visible on the pages for each councillor.
This is the first step for the feeds – once we’re sure things are working correctly, we’ll be releasing aggregated feeds for political parties as well. We are also looking into providing feeds for each of the new council filters we are introducing.
As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions let us know!
2 Responses
Labour Councillor for Sunderland City Council, New to Twitter, Would love to join Councillors Tweeps, what do i need to do?
Hi Dianne,
Let us know your Twitter name by email - site@cllrtweeps.com or in a comment on the blog. Once we’ve verified you (by checking your updates and your council website), we’ll add you to the site.
Dafydd