A month ago, I announced
the existance of lagen.nu. I thought I
could do a ”alpha” release, without doing much PR for it, but the web
does not work that way. Several bloggers relayed the
news, Google indexed the site, and the hits started trickling
in. These are the numbers for the last 24 hours:
log entries after filtering: 2679 page views: 1197 Unique visitors: 582 Unique 2+ page visitors: 181 Unique IP adresses: 567 Search engine referers: 585 Internal searches: 100 Bookmarked frontpage visitors: 46 Bookmarked frontpage visits: 58
These might not be earth-shattering numbers, but I’m very happy
with them, particularly as they are steadily increasing. Pretty soon,
the site will go from being hosted under my desk to being
professionally handled by the very nice people at Mr Friday.
Furthermore, specific laws on the site has been referenced in
various web discussion forums when discussing swedish law, which is
exactly how I hoped the site would be used. And I must mention the
very blog-esque button that Kadrik made (look for the
yellow and blue button in the left hand column). Neat!
But other than obsessivly tracking referers and analyzing web
server logs, I’ve been slacking pretty much this month. Some work has
been done on the text->XML conversion, more work has been going into
trimming the update process (currently done each wednesday, when new
laws generally become available), and I’ve started tackling the
problem of recognizing tabular data in plaintext and formatting it
appropriately. I’m also working on a series of postings detailing the
tech used behind the scenes, which you might be interested in if you
want to do some large-scale web scraping with Python.
The pace will probably pick up in December. The 17th is my last day
at work, and then I’ll have almost a month of free time before school
starts (that is IF I get in… keep your fingers
crossed). If you have any comments on the site, or suggestions on how
to make it more useful, please mail me (or comment on this
post). This goes double for those of you working in the legal
profession or studying law.
