All these new MPs

Over the weekend, and this morning, I’ve been updating the Public Whip and TheyWorkForYou database of MPs. This was much easier this year thanks, amazingly to Macromedia Flash. The BBC have a fantastic animated constituency map which is made in flash. When you click on a constituency it gives you the results. Now, one little know thing about flash is that it uses XML to communicate with the server. This means that any data it downloads must be in XML.

Further investigating reveals that you can download results data from URLs like http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/flash_map/resultdata/200.xml. So I wrote a script to download these and convert them to XML. May I present a list of all the new MPs. Now, just need to wait for them to start talking and voting so we can build up a record of them. Meanwhile, on to some mySociety work; fixing up WriteToThem…

Praise be to Macromedia!