London Build and Deploy Job RSS Feed
• Julian Simpson
Short story: I made an RSS feed for Build and Deploy jobs in London. I'm going to run it as a public service until January and see if it's helped anyone. If I help one person find a job in that time, I'll be very happy.
Long story: I get asked if I know anybody who can do build and deployment work around London. Generally I don't. I'm happy to blog about them, but as my readership is mostly in North America (rankings for last month were 1. USA, 2. UK, 3. Germany and 4. Canada) I wanted to come up with a way to help, but keep the content relevant to the majority.
Microformats were the first idea that came to mind. Keep a page with job listings in a microformat, scrape the page and render into RSS. I started reading up on it but decided I'd park that. What worked, and what I could write offline on the train on my eeepc was simpler: a YAML file of jobs, and some Ruby scripts to generate an RSS feed. CruiseControl pushes the XML file of RSS feed out when there's an update, and Feedburner does the work in counting subscribers and allowing me freedom to change the backend implementation. Beats reading Metro.
Anyway, that didn't scale, so I now use a commercial job board tool and a Yahoo Pipe to filter out just the London jobs. Yahoo Pipes are great.
(image taken from foundphotoslj's photostream)