See the live version at http://stopSB4.com

Texas is passing a dangerous and racist bill (SB4). This is a project that seeks to collect public statements against the bill.

It was built in a few hours to serve one purpose, but maybe you can use it for something else.

There's a google spreadsheet which looks something like this.

The app has a function (which I've hackily hooked up to the GET /refresh endpoint) which will grab the data from the spreadsheet and put it into a MongoDB database. It does this by using the columns variable (to map from the column names in the spreadsheet to database friendly keys)

On startup, the server grabs a copy of the data from the database and stores it in memory. This is probably bad, but it works for now.

The GET / endpoint serves a page (rendered using handlebars) that shows all of the quotes from the in-memory copy of the data.

The public/client.js uses a tiny bit of client-side javascript to do client-side filtering of the statements.

I run this on heroku. When you make the app, provision a mongo db database from mLab through heroku. Then, add a config variable for the google spreadsheet id. The Google Spreadsheet will need to be public (unless you modify the Google API call to use authentication.)

When you navigate to yourapp.herokuapp.com/refresh the website won't load, but you should get some messages in your server logs showing that it is copying data from the spreadsheet to the database. I have found that after this, I sometimes need to restart the application server to get the in-memory cache to be correct.

Then, when you navigate to yourapp.herokuapp.com/refresh it should show you things.

I expect you'll have problems if you try to run this. Here's a few of them

• My spreadsheet has 3 worksheets. The data is in the third one. Therefore, I ask the API for the 3rd worksheet (the library is 1 based not 0 based).
• If your columns are named different things you'll need to change the columns variable (because I'm only grabbing specific columns from it)
• If you have more columns, you might need to change the Google Spreadsheet query (in the refreshData method)
• If you want to run the server locally, you'll need some Environment variables (see the top of server.js)