About Los Alamos Meetings

and How to Use This Page

The purpose of this page is to provide a simplified view of county government meetings in Los Alamos, NM.

Los Alamos County announces its meetings on a calendar page on a service called Legistar. To find out about new meetings, you have to

1. Load the calendar page every day
2. Scan the page for meetings and try to remember which ones you've already seen
3. For each meeting, check and see whether it has an agenda link yet, and if so, try to remember if it's one you already looked at
4. Whether or not the agenda is new, download each meeting's PDF, view it, and see if any part of it has changed since you last looked

I mean, wow, you really have to be dedicated to keep track of meetings in Los Alamos.

Also, if you ever need to view a different month, Legistar remembers that forever rather than defaulting to "show current meetings", so the next time you load the page you might not realize that you're looking at the wrong month.

Legistar has what looks like an RSS button on the calendar page -- but it doesn't do anything. It's just a picture of a button with no link attached. There's an actual button you can click on for "Alerts", where you can sign up for email alerts -- but only for county council meetings, not the rest, and it doesn't even cover all council meetings. It doesn't give you any hint what might be on the agenda. And it only alerts you for a while; after a month or two it stopped sending any updates. Maybe you're supposed to re-register every month.

So I wrote this Los Alamos Meetings script. It provides RSS as well as a simplified web page you can check to find out which meetings have been newly added to the list, and which ones have new agendas. If an agenda has changed, it shows you a page highlighting the changes. That doesn't happen often but it's important to know when it does.

Los Alamos Meetings updates once a day, currently around 3:45pm. (I don't know when they update Legistar. If anyone knows, please let me know.)

This project is free open source software: losalamosmtgs.py on GitHub.

What's this "RSS" thing?

You're welcome to use this service just by loading the Los Alamos Meetings page in a browser; but its primary purpose as an RSS feed.

I point my RSS reader at the Los Alamos Meetings RSS Feed once a day, and it collects all the entries that changed since yesterday.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way of keeping track of which things you've already seen, so you only read the ones that are new. It's widely used on sites like newspapers and blogs that frequently add new content. Several browsers, like Chrome and Vivaldi, have RSS readers built in; some mail programs, like Thunderbird, also handle RSS, and there are RSS-to-email gateways that let you read RSS using any mail reader.

Some articles on how to read RSS feeds:

• The top five RSS readers for keeping up with your news feeds (the Verge)
• 5 Novel RSS Reader Apps to Change How You Get News Feeds and Updates
• Google rediscovers RSS: tests new feature to ‘follow’ sites in Chrome on Android.
• Wikipedia: Comparison of feed aggregators ("feed aggregators" means more or less the same thing as "RSS reader")
• Wired: The Best RSS Feed Readers, though most of their choices have monthly fees; the Vivaldi browser is the only pick that doesn't.
• A web search for rss reader is also helpful. I recommend limiting the search to "Past year" since there are some older RSS readers that are no longer supported.

You can also follow RSS feeds with Mastodon, using RSS Parrot.

Make an RSS feed for sites that don't offer one with RSS Anything (diffbot).

(Sorry, I can't recommend a particular RSS reader; I use one I wrote called FeedMe, but it's tricky to set up so I wouldn't recommend it for a beginner.)

Whether you use RSS or just visit the web page, I hope you find Los Alamos Meetings useful. Feel free to email Akkana if you have questions, problems or feature requests.

Back to Los Alamos Meetings page.