First Post: Hello World

Hey, I'm Ryan, and I've decided that as I take on this side project of mine, I'd document my wins and losses- I'm building in the open, so to speak. But what am I building?

I'm glad you asked. I'm working on three different products, but I'm currently focusing on only two. The first is an API to serve legislative data from all 50 states, the six U.S. territories, and Congress. There are indeed other services that do this, but to create a Legislative Intelligence Portal (LegiPortal), I was going to have to fork out several (XX,000) thousand dollars a month, and that's with someone else's branding on it. So to do what I want to do, I started by making my own API (api.legiportal.com).

As of yesterday afternoon, I'm now touching all 57 data points. Today, I'm going through and working to pull all of the important data needed from each of the states... and every one of them is different. 🙄

After I get about halfway through the state scrapers, again, I'll start on the portal. In short, users will be able to access the portal to retrieve all the necessary legislation. At the moment, I'm just looking to cover 2025, but I do intend to go back to the early years later. The best part is what you get for free (there will be four tiers).

For now, I'm back to working on Arizona. They are only one of two states that can't use HTML or an API... gotta be different.