A father-son civic hacking duo behind online trackers that evaluate state websites on Tuesday unveiled a new website tracker that ranks the public’s digital experience in 50 states.
The new tracker, ScanGov, is an aggregate of two trackers created by Luke Fretwell, a former journalist who now runs the tech firm ProudCity, and his son, Elias. In addition to metadata and URL configuration settings, the new ScanGov tool adds data on how well state websites cater to web crawlers. Leaving instructions for the bots that scan the internet for new content in a “robots.txt” file allows websites to limit requests and block bots from indexing certain content, easing server load.
