Around here, we use APIs. href=”http://capitolwords.org/api/”>CapitolWords.org has an API linked from the home page, but our Systems Guru Tim Ball noticed someone scraping the site dictionary word by dictionary word. I know, it’s hard to let go of one’s dysfunctions, but you we want you to use our data. We have an API.

Our Django Voting App gets some love. ThisWeekinDjango.com threw more whuffie our way by highlighting our open source module for allowing users to vote without having to login.

Touched by Brian Behlendorf. Brian was a key developer behind Apache, Apache Foundation, and Subversion. Brian also wrote this great essay in 1999 about open source and platforms and visited our offices this week in 2009 to discuss open source in government. Also visiting was Deb Bryant from Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab who’s infrastructure hosts the BIG open source projects.

See Ali blog. Blog. Blog. Blog. Senior Designer Ali Felski, who joined Sunlight in the fall and makes these beautiful pages, blogged here for the first time this week, writing about her mockup of a redesigned USA.gov site.

Apps for America already Rocking!
It’s a big deal when the author The Rails Way Obie Fernandez spends his Day of Service working on a transparency app. It’s also pretty amazing when guy who’s you only know by his weird blog name hears about our Apps for America Contest and creates a hack to use our API and Google to automagically discover the RSS feed every Member of Congress!

Stimulus package spreadsheet Clay and Jeremy put together a public Google spreadsheet of spending in the proposed stimulus package. Read the post here.

Maven Tim’s Restaurant Pick: Nava Thai Because it is “friendly” and “cheap” after you spent all your money on inauguration celebrations.

Labs Tweet of the Week: @jroo tweeted: “‘Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency’: http://tinyurl.com/aul7os“