Tutorial
Linking directly to an issue of interest on StickyVote.com by using a voting widget.
Motivation:
Example: Let's say you're the writer, Art Brodsky, writing for the D.C.-based public interest group, Public Knowledge, and you're writing an article that is directly related to the H.R. 5353, The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, Here. You would like to have a voting widget on your website such as the following, so that a user can vote his or her preference on the bill in question:
This tutorial will walk you through preparing a widget like this so that you can paste the code for it directly into your web site and enable your readers to make their voice heard by their senators and representatives, on any piece of legislation, easily.
Step 1: Find the official bill number for the legislation you wish
to link to
Every
bill number in the U.S. federal legislature
has a letter prefix. For example, most federal bill numbers start with
one of
five prefixes: "H.R.*, H.RES.*, H.CON.RES*, S.*," or "S.RES.*". Each
"*"
corresponding to the numerical portion of the bill number. For
instance, the official bill number for the Internet Freedom
Preservation Act above would be H.R.5353.Now, moving on to a different piece of legislation, let's say that we're no longer concerned with H.R.5353. Instead, we are writing a different article about a bill concerning making English the official language of the U.S., but we don't know the bill number. We do know, though, that the title is something "english language unity", so we do a google search and obtain the following results:
So, given the above results, we can tell that the number associated with the English Language Unity Act is H.R.997. Now that we know the bill number, we can proceed to step 2.
Step 2: Find the corresponding Issue ID on StickyVote.com
Because of the complexity of dealing with different issue prefixes and suffixes, StickyVote does not use the official alpha-numeric bill number to reference bills in the database. Instead, we use a single five-digit Issue ID. Now, in order to find the Issue ID corresponding to H.R.997, navigate to StickyVote issue search. Enter "997" into the search field, and press enter. Now, Among the bills displayed is one titled "English Language Unity Act of 2007." Since this is the bill we're trying to find, we click it, at which point we see the following:
The key thing to note here is the number circled in red at the top of the screen shot: "10141". This is Issue ID for this particular bill. The Issue ID is also the number that we will need to complete our final step, and put the correct voting widget on our website.
Step 3: Insert the Issue ID into the
given code block, and paste it into your web site's HTML
The code that you need to insert into your site looks like this:
But one modification needs to be made first. This is to replace "#####" with the 5-digit Issue ID you just determined, which in the case of the H.R.997, was 10141. This number will of course differ depending on the bill that you have looked up. So, in order to display the widget corresponding to H.R.997 on your site, you need to paste the following code into your site's html:
This code should be treated just like any other html element - a picture, for example, and aligned on your page however you see fit. The result is the following:
Now that you've made one voting widget, all you have to do next time you want to create a widget for a particular issue is to find the corresponding Issue ID number and insert it into the code. And best of all, now your readers have a way to interact with your articles that they didn't have before!