Adam Pearce
http://roadtolarissa.com/whitehouse/
I finished writing the scrapper and graphing aspects of this a few weeks ago; I’ve been putting off publicly posting while trying to make it more attractive/usable.
I’m mostly worried about the color scheme. I didn’t want to embarrass myself making something garish, so I went in a very drab, utilitarian direction. I think I may have gone too far, but I’m not sure what good alternative would look like. I got away with not worrying too much about color with redditgraphs because the data was naturally graphable with many different colors which allowed the layout to be understated. That really isn’t possible with the petitions.
I’m also not sure about the layout. On widescreens, the two charts are shown side by side so all the petition info can be view on one screen. On smaller displays though, this makes the charts a little too small. I could make the charts bigger with a toggle button or showing them stacked on top of each other like they are with non-widescreens, but that would require clicking a button or scrolling to view all the information about a petition. Additionally if I start tracking more petitions, I will need to make the left panel scrollable.
Finally, I’ve derived estimations about party affiliation and age for each petition and I don’t know how to include them. Since these estimations are based only on name and location, they aren’t nearly as accurate as the gender ones – 35% of the people wanting to impeach Obama are apparently democrats – so I’ve left them out to avoid cluttering the table more. They do a decent job of showing the relative rank of each petition though and should probably be included.