Some folks have been praising the new Tennessee General Assembly website. It looks like the same old back end with a pretty new face to me. At least searches seem faster.

The new "my bills" feature sounds nice. I haven't tried it, but it's supposed to let you get email updates and an RSS feed of action on bills you are tracking. But you are limited to three groups of ten bills each. Seems like an odd constraint. And why not also have an RSS feed of all action on all bills? That would be excellent.

It would also be nice if they archived bills and videos from past sessions and made them searchable.

I noticed they have some agenda documents posted as Microsoft Word files, which isn't cool. Somebody get the person responsible for that a copy of Adobe Acrobat.

Anyway, I read somewhere that the makeover cost $50K+. Not sure what they got for that. If it was new hardware to make it faster along with the facelift that might sound reasonable. If it's just the facelift, I'm not so sure. But that's one of the many reasons why I'm not in the web development business.

UPDATE: I just found something else nice that I think is new. On the member directories, it has a "sponsored bills list." Don't remember that from before. That will make it easier to track the goofy Campfield bills!

UPDATE: Looks like the same people did Georgia's website, but their bill tracker has a few more bells and whistles and no limits.

UPDATE: Florida's site has more extensive search capabilities (you can search bills or statutes), and results for bills link to the statutes they apply to. It's still a little weird to navigate. The "bill information report" is pretty slick. I don't see a "tracker" capability, but the site is so busy it's hard to tell.