This is the last update of the new year, I have resynchronized to the Congress Merge database and noted the change in part of Representative Peter Griffith of th 5th District of Alabama from Democrat to Republican.

The move to the new server has been completely shaken out. Everything seems to be working much more smoothly. Just tracking traffic to be sure I am within my budget. Also updated the database on the site to be in sync with Congress Merge.

Today, after a bit of preparation, I have moved Contacting the Congress to its own server. This move was brought about by the fact that twice in the last year the traffic on this site got so high that it brought down my ISP’s “”personal webpage”" server. This new server should mean much faster load times as well as an ability to handle loads when the site has a high number of visitors. This server will allow me to slowly migrate the site from the 10 year old perl code with a custom database I wrote to PHP using MySQL, which is much quicker and more robust.

I updated the database on the site to match the current version of the Congress Merge database.

The traffic has died down, so I have turned off caching. I have also added support for tracking Twitter feeds for members of Congress that are using that service.

For the second September in a row, and for that matter, the second time ever, the site traffic has gotten high enough to require me to turn on some rudimentary caching. This means I have to disable address-based searches for now. Sorry.

Site has been updated to reflect the death of Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA).

I’ve been working on my house and didn’t have time to update. But I have just synchronized to the current Congress Merge database.

Took time off from my vacation to update the site to reflect the fact that my home state, Minnesota, finally has two senators again.

Updated to the current version of the database as well as fixing the Congress number (since it has been the 111th Congress now for 5 months, even if I still don’t have a second senator) in the downloadable files.