To celebrate Patriots’ Day (and also, because a week has eclipsed), a round up of recent bug fixes and tweaks on MuckRock, plus how you can get involved in our civic hacking projects.
For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes, and if you’d like to get a list of site improvements every Tuesday - along with ways to help contribute to the site’s development yourself - subscribe to our developer newsletter here.
What’s new on MuckRock
API fixes
After we fixed some API issues last week, those fixes broke other parts of our API. Some calls were returning URLs with “https://www.muckrock.com” preceding them, resulting in URLs that looked like:
https://www.muckrock.comhttps://www.muckrock.com/foi/dekalb-county-4877/dekalb-county-school-district-bus-driver-sickout-71643/
This is now fixed!
Annual organization plans by request
We’ve rolled out the first official version of annual payment plans to select customers. We still have some more tweaking to do before we can allow anyone to sign up, but if you’d like to switch your current organization plans from monthly to annual email michael@muckrock.com and we’ll help you get set up.
Improved receipt rendering
We tweaked receipt rendering so that they should be easier to review on your accounts page or under your Organization account page if the receipts are through an Org account. Note that historical receipts will not appear, only receipts generated over the past few weeks and going forward. If you’re missing a receipt that is not appearing there, you can email info@muckrock.com and we’ll get you a fresh copy.
Come hack on MuckRock
If you’re the kind of person who gets excited about building cool, impactful open source software, you might also be interested in our Tuesday meetups in Cambridge, Massachusetts or our other open source efforts.
There are a number of ways to help us continue to improve the core MuckRock site experience. We have a project and a weekly newsletter, “Release Notes,” that highlights everything we’re working on. Register to get a summary of site updates each week and details on open issues you can help with.
Check out some of our issues labeled “help wanted” for ideas on where’s good to start, or just pop into our Slack’s #Developers channel.
Subscribers to the weekly newsletter get exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits exclusively for subscribers. You can subscribe to the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.
If you spot a bug or have a feature request, you can also help by opening an issue on GitHub.
If you do, please search open issues first to make sure it hasn’t already been reported. If it has been reported previously, please leave an additional comment letting us know it’s an issue for you, particularly if you can provide more details about when it crops up or what you think is causing the problem.
In addition to the new newsletter, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
