The Hampton Roads Daily Press has put together an enormously impressive Legislative Watch section of their website, allowing their readers to keep up with area legislators, and they’ve done it by integrating Richmond Sunlight’s database with their own website. DP readers are shown all ten of their delegates and all five of their senators, and a clever tab-based interface displays legislators’ stats at a glance, including party, district, committees, contact information, bills, and recently-cast votes. The paper even provides a tag cloud of legislation topics and a list of all bills filed.

We have an ever-expanding application programming interface (API) that makes it easy for website developers to pull data from our database and show it on their site, and the Daily Press‘ Aaron Bycoffe has done a bang-up job of doing just that. If you’re interested in integrating portions of Richmond Sunlight into your website, e-mail us and we’ll be happy to help you out.

You don’t just have to list bills in your Photosynthesis portfolio — you can advocate for or against them, too, so that anybody viewing your public portfolio can see your arguments. While viewing your portfolio, look over on the far right side of any table row listing a bill. You’ll see two letters — “x” and “e.” These little links mean “delete” and “edit,” respectively. (We’ll have something less cryptic soon — we promise.)

Click on the “e” next to the bill that you want to write up your position on, and you’ll be presented with a text box where you can write whatever you like. Basic HTML is permitted, and you can write as much as you want. Whether you want to provide a few words or an entire position paper, just text or embed YouTube video, that’s your space to try to persuade others to see things from your perspective.

Right now your notes appear only in your portfolio, but soon enough they’ll be integrated with the comments within bill pages, which will put your $0.02 in front of hundreds or thousands of readers.

These are the ten most-watched bills — those bills that the largest number of people have in their Photosynthesis portfolios:

1. HB55: English; designating as official language of State.
2. HB12: Payday lending charges; establishes maximum annual interest rate.
3. SB38: Bipartisan Redistricting Commission; created.
4. SB25: Payday Loan Act; repealing Act referring thereto.
5. SJ7: Constitutional amendment; restoration of civil rights for certain felons.
6. HB81: Abortion; illegal upon overturning of Roe v. Wade.
7. SJ5: Constitutional amendment; establishing Redistricting Commission.
8. HB92: Standards of Quality; requires that average teacher salary be not less than annual national salary.
9. SB8: Absentee voting; qualified voters may vote absentee without providing a reason.
10. HB20: Primary elections; voter registration by political party.

Since last April’s Virginia Tech shootings, there’s been a lot of talk of mental health being the leading issue for the 2008 General Assembly session. Today, a slew of mental health bills were pre-filed, largely by Sen. Janet Howell and Sen. Ken Cuccinelli. More are surely in the pipeline.