Projo Politics Blog

Legislative staffers were crowing last week about their newly designed Web site.

First the good news for media outlets that do not have their own reporters at the State House and members of the general public who want to hear what their lawmakers sound like:

The site now provides General Assembly-provided audio for the first time of lawmakers talking about their legislation and easy-to-grab quotes for radio and TV and podcasts.

The opening page also features a new scroll of coming events written by the publicists in the General Assembly’s press office. Here visitors will be able to find announcements about General Assembly activities, such as hearings, news conferences and special reports, with links to more detailed information.

Expected to be added soon is a new link for Capitol Television, where the schedule of daily broadcasts will be a new feature.

Bad news? Some computer viewers may find, as did this Political Scene scribe, that the all-important menu page has grown fuzzy and no longer fits on the screen, and all attempts to fix it by the General Assembly’s technology staff have unwelcome and unintended consequences.

But start-up glitches aside, the site has not lost the hugely valuable information it contained before the upgrade, including online committee and floor calendars with links to every bill coming up for a hearing or vote and a status report on where the bill is in the labyrinthine legislative process.

“While several other improvements and additions will be made during the next several weeks,” a General Assembly news release said, “what has not changed is the vast amount of information available on the site. That material consists of about 110,000 static pages including bill copy, bill status, daily House and Senate Journals and calendars and similar information for previous legislative sessions, as well as the General Laws and Public Laws.”

The page registers about 2,500 hits per day during the peak legislative season.

Still at the same Web address — rilin.state.ri.us — the recent changes to the site were created under the auspices of the Joint Committee on Legislative Services, and spearheaded by the Legislative Data Systems office of the General Assembly.

The site upgrade work was coordinated by Michael Kilmartin, director of Legislative Data Systems, which maintains the Assembly’s Web site and database of legislative information. Assistance on the site design and new functionality (ticker, mp3 player, coding) was provided by Atrion Networking Corporation at an estimated cost of $8,620. The final bill has not arrived.

smackay@projo.com

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