The Find Your MP service has been revised. The service uses the new site design and a simplified interface: you can now search for your MP’s details using a postcode, constituency name or Member name from a single search box.
The aim during the development of the service was to remain transparent, publicly visible and accountable. Wherever possible, the choice was made to use open source technologies – and to make code and data available, unless legally constrained. The project was delivered using a set of tools and services that have supported our preferred lightweight working practices:
- Distributed version control: git, publicly available and hosted on github
- Issue tracking: Google Code project hosting
- Communication: team members on Twitter, project updates having their own account at @fymp
- Web framework: Apache and Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails (using ZenTest and Cucumber for testing and spec assurance), MySQL Community Server
- Hosting and storage: Amazon S3, EC2
- Virtual machine construction: Elastic Server
- Load testing: siege
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7/05/2009 at 3:35 pm
Terence Eden
An impressive start. Does it do follow-ups like http://www.writetothem.com/ ?
Specifically the stats available on http://www.writetothem.com/stats/2007/zeitgeist
7/05/2009 at 6:31 pm
Ned
Can’t bring up Lembit Öpik by surname (with or without the diacritic). Haven’t found anything else ‘wrong’ yet
7/05/2009 at 7:39 pm
Ned
Now I think about it, I typed ‘ö’ (doesn’t work) rather than ‘Ö’ (does work). Forgot about that behaviour, sorry.
7/05/2009 at 8:56 pm
Matthew
Nice to see things like partial postcode search, although more just from curiosity than anything else.
Pity if you actually try and send a message, all you get is “The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn’t have access to.”
More minor bug feedback: there’s no feedback if I enter something that gives no results; I already gave my postcode in the search box, why do I have to enter it again when writing a letter; you might want to change your “Thorn” example given the Spelthorne result is someone you can’t contact through the service
; all the list links on the left hand side go to pages that still link to the UpMyStreet version.
8/05/2009 at 9:20 am
Alistair Reid
Hello – thanks for your feedback.
@Terence – there’s no feedback facility. If there’s resource for future development we could consider this.
@Ned Öpik issue fixed I believe.
@Matthew – list links: those pages should be updating shortly (separate department); nice spot on the Thorn issue.