Open Government
Bridging the BLM ePlanning portal
I've built and released another custom RSS-Bridge—this one for the Bureau of Land Management's ePlanning website.
This bridge creates a real-time RSS feed for the "Documents" section of any NEPA project on the site. For those of us who need to track agency filings, this provides an automated way to see new scoping notices, draft EAs, or final decisions the moment they are posted, without having to manually check the website every day.
Like the Congress.gov bridge I shared last night, this one is necessary because the ePlanning site is a complex, JavaScript-driven application that doesn't provide its own data feeds. This bridge uses a browser backend to render the page and extract the document data for you.
Here’s how to use it:
- First, navigate to the ePlanning project page you want to track.
For example, a project's "Documents" page might have this URL:
https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2017275/570- From the URL, identify the two numbers at the end of the path.
In my example, the Project ID is 2017275 and the Document Folder ID is 570.
- Now, go to https://rssbridge.sij.law and select the "BLM ePlanning Documents" bridge from the list.
- Enter the two ID numbers into the corresponding fields to generate your feed.
- Copy the resulting Atom RSS feed link.
You can now subscribe to that feed link in your reader of choice to get notified of new filings automatically.
As always, the tool is live at https://rssbridge.sij.law, and the code is open for you to peruse and use at https://sij.ai/sij/rss-bridge.
Another Bridge Built: Tracking Congress
I've built a new custom RSS-Bridge that provides real-time feeds for actions on any bill on Congress.gov.
Hey folks,
I've just added a new tool to my public RSS-Bridge instance that lets you create a real-time RSS feed for any bill in the U.S. Congress.
You can now head over to https://rssbridge.sij.law, select the "Congress.gov Bill Actions" bridge, and plug in a bill's details—like "119th Congress, House Bill, 4422"—to get a feed of its complete legislative history. This is a great way to programmatically track a bill as it moves from introduction through committee and onto the floor.
This one was a bit more challenging to build than the White House bridges. The congress.gov website uses Cloudflare's anti-bot protection, which immediately blocks the simple web requests that RSS-Bridge normally uses. To get around this, the bridge is designed to work with another open-source tool called FlareSolverr. It acts as a proxy, using a real browser engine to solve Cloudflare's security challenges before fetching the page. This two-part setup allows the bridge to access the data reliably.
Because the bridge requires this extra FlareSolverr dependency, it's not a candidate for the main RSS-Bridge project. But for those of you running a similar self-hosted setup, the code is fully available for you to inspect or use yourself.
• Try it out: https://rssbridge.sij.law
• See the code: https://sij.ai/sij/rss-bridge
Bridges to Nowhere
Resurrecting the White House Feeds with RSS-Bridge.
Not long ago, the White House website provided a simple, powerful, and standard public service: RSS feeds for its "Presidential Actions." For anyone who wanted to systematically track Executive Orders, Proclamations, or Memoranda, these feeds delivered structured, machine-readable data directly to your feed reader of choice, creating a reliable, real-time record of executive action.
Sometime recently, that service disappeared. The official /feed/ URLs now lead to a "404 Page Not Found" error:
This is more than a technical inconvenience. It is a quiet but meaningful degradation of public infrastructure. The burden of tracking government action has been shifted from an efficient, automated "push" system to a manual, laborious "pull" system. Citizens, journalists, and legal professionals are now expected to repeatedly visit the website and visually scan for changes—a process that is inefficient, prone to error, and fundamentally less transparent.
This represents a deliberate shift from structured data to unstructured presentation. An RSS feed is more than a list of links; it is a promise of machine-readability, a channel for automated monitoring. By removing it, the administration trades genuine transparency for digital aesthetics, replacing an open data stream with a static webpage. The public record may still exist, but the ability to easily and systematically engage with it has been degraded.
Rebuilding the Bridge
When an official channel is dismantled, the open-source community often provides the tools to rebuild it. In this case, the foundation for a solution is RSS-Bridge, a powerful, self-hosted framework that generates feeds for websites that lack them.
The true strength of RSS-Bridge is its extensibility. The platform allows anyone to write a small, specific PHP script—a "bridge"—that tells the system how to parse a particular website. I developed a suite of these custom bridges to target the White House pages, restoring the original functionality by turning the unstructured HTML back into structured data feeds.
Use the Bridges
The goal of this work is to share the solution. To that end, the bridges are available for public use. You can generate feeds from my public instance at https://rssbridge.sij.law, view the live output in my FreshRSS reader at https://rss.sij.law, or grab the code from GitHub to run it yourself. The code is open source and available on my fork of the project (look for the WhiteHouse*.php files), pending its inclusion in the main repository.
The Enduring Need for Watchtowers
The removal of a simple RSS feed is symptomatic of a larger trend toward a less open, less verifiable digital commons. When official sources of information become less reliable, the need for independent, citizen-run "watchtowers" grows. This problem of disappearing infrastructure is a close cousin to the issue of link rot I explored in a previous post, "Toward Enduring Web Citations." Tools like RSS-Bridge and ArchiveBox provide a powerful counternarrative, equipping us to build more resilient and trustworthy methods for accessing public information. We cannot afford to be passive consumers of data that can be altered or removed on a whim; we must build and maintain our own bridges.
