Introducing The Raleigh Wire Service

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I’m finally ready to share something that’s been running behind the scenes for awhile now. I call it The Raleigh Wire service and it’s more of a service-like “bot” that posts to this topic.

Using the city’s website and their open data portal, I’ve built a service that checks for updates and posts them publicly here on the Community. Right now, some site plan submissions and zoning requests are being tracked. The plan is to add more data sources in the future. Let’s see how this works here on the community first and go from there.

I named the bot, DevBot, and the thread is read-only. If something needs to start a new topic, we can copy and paste or just move it to start a new topic on a project.

This topic here is for questions, feedback, etc on the service.

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I’m definitely a fan of the idea (and it’s a good way for people on this site to have the same baseline to have conversations on this forum). Heck, this could even turn into an interesting Twitter bot or a public website/news feed, too.

I totally understand the need for the acronyms, abbreviations etc. to make each bot output shorter. …but even then, I wonder if there’s a way to make it a bit more user-friendly and easier to read instantly.

For example, is there a way you could have it so that, if you hover your cursor over an acronym (which seems to only come from a finite list), it’ll show you what that word stands for? (I’m not sure how much control you have over this forum’s source code or formatting, but the CSS script for it doesn’t seem that hard to use)

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That is great idea! Yes, I believe that is possible. Let me queue that one up.

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Applied some small tweaks to the service this weekend.

  • Links should show completely now rather than broken up in some cases
  • Date formats should show in human readable and not in integer format
  • Status abbreviations are just replaced with the full status text
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Thanks Leo. Unfortunately, some links are still split.

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Haha. Going forward, they should work. However, you bring up a good point, I should fix the ones already posted. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Oh…I misunderstood. I thought that those were fixed. :joy:

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I’m sure this isn’t an issue with the devbot, but what’s up with the broken links we get sometimes?

For instance, the link to the doc here is broken for me:
https://community.dtraleigh.com/t/the-raleigh-wire-service/748/77

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Exactly. I’ve seen instances where the city’s data feed gives me a link but it points to nothing. So either the link is wrong and or there is no pdf uploaded yet.

Quality of the service depends on the quality of the data I’m afraid. :slightly_frowning_face:

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