Our public-facing pace of development is going to slow a bit as we focus on reworking a lot of our user authentication and permissions systems, but we did fix up some RSS feeds last week so now you can subscribe to your favorite MuckRock requesters and get updates on what they’re filing.

For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes, and if you’d like to get a list of site improvements every Tuesday - along with ways to help contribute to the site’s development yourself - subscribe to our developer newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

What’s new on MuckRock

RSS is dead; long live RSS!

During some refactoring, we accidentally killed user-specific RSS feeds, but they’re now back and, if not better than ever, at least as syndicated as ever.

RSS feeds are not particularly well documented at the moment (working on that this week), but in the meantime, think of user-specific RSS feeds like our very own secret menu. For those who want to be in the know, here are the URLs for various feeds:

• All new communications on all of a user’s public requests: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/feeds/username/
• Newly submitted requests by a user: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/feeds/submitted/username/
• Updates on completed requests for a user: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/feeds/completed/username/

Come hack on MuckRock

We have a growing group of volunteer hackers helping to make MuckRock better every day. We want to make it easier to contribute, so we’re launching a new project and weekly newsletter, “Release Notes.” Register to get a summary of site updates each week, a list of issues you can help with, and details about our Code for Boston meetups.

Check out some of our issues labeled “help wanted” for ideas on where’s good to start, or just pop into our Slack’s #Developers channel.

Subscribers to the weekly newsletter get exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits exclusively for subscribers. You can subscribe to to the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

If you want to contribute better FOIA tools for thousands of requesters, there’s a number of ways to help. If you find a bug you can email us directly or open an issue on GitHub.

If you do the latter, please search open issues first to make sure it hasn’t already been reported. If it has been reported previously, please leave an additional comment letting us know it’s an issue for you, particularly if you can provide more details about when it crops up or what you think is causing the problem.

In addition to the new newsletter, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack. You can also join us at Code for Boston’s weekly hack nights, which take place Tuesday evenings in Kendall Square. We might not make it to every one of them, so if you want to meet up there it’s a good idea to check in on Slack first or check the newsletter. We will be at tomorrow’s meetup.

Image via Wikimedia Commons