Back in August, I released an initial version of a Ruby gem for the Sunlight Labs API. The gem has since been used in many projects, most famously on Tweet Congress.

This weekend at Transparency Camp, I set out to improve several aspects of the gem, including adding a twitter_id field, which wasn’t there back in August when I made the initial release. Changes include:

• Add support for twitter_id and youtube_url on Legislator
• Add Legislator#search_by_name for fuzzy name searching
• Add Legislator#all_in_zipcode for better lookups on a five-digit zip code
• Raise exception when API Key isn’t set
• Credit for various fixes goes to GitHub users pengwynn, hoverbird, and wilson

Check it out on GitHub. Ruby developers participating in Apps for America will hopefully find it indispensable.