Meeting at the Ozone

[noonan.m.e]

I will not be attending the meeting at the Ozone since I live in Michigan. I would however still like to help. I see this page as a merge between monster and crowdspring. It is a place were we can go for help and also the clients. Since this seems to be Mike's baby, how about you tell us what you want and we can raise our hands, since I assume that most of us are not in California. I also do not like the over 40 thing for two reasons, 1) I am under forty, 2) cutting out a lot of people.

[Michael J. Fuhrman]

Noonan.m.e,

Thanks for letting me know. most appreciated. I will post some notes
about tonights meeting tomorrow =)

Mike,

[Warren Vail]

Consider the forty plus idea withdrawn.  It does not do us any good to exclude anyone.

 

Would there still be any interest in something like a job board?  I am looking at doing that for a Drupal site for this 40 plus domain, perhaps we could do something similar for this group?

 

Warren Vail

Vail Systems Technology

war...@vailtech.net

(510) 444-5380

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[Michael J. Fuhrman]

There is room for discussion about the job board. =)

[Warren Vail]

Cool, I won't do anything until it looks certain.

One of the things I did for the stagnant fortyplus site was added an
aggregation of a RSS feed of job opportunities in the tech fields from
indeed.com. If I remember correctly I establish an account and some search
criterion at indeed.com and load that info as an aggregator block and loaded
the block on the home page so that any visitor will see the latest 5 hits on
the home page as a clickable list of openings that changes with time. The
links take someone to the indeed.com website to view the complete job
description.

Perhaps for this site looking for text like "contract" in the search
criterion would be appropriate. It's a fast way to generate content, and
indeed hosts openings from lot's of other sites like Dice and all the
others.

It's a good way to get started with Drupal and works in Drupal 7. I'll be
happy to help if someone else would like to tackle this, and if it seems
appropriate.

Warren Vail
Vail Systems Technology
war...@vailtech.net
(510) 444-5380

[Wjhonson]

I certainly like the idea of a feed as opposed to yet another job board.
A feed from Indeed would be a good start.  Can I suggest also a feed from Craigslist?  Also let the user pick their search criteria.  There is a Google gadget to do something close to this, but it's not great, just a template idea.

I was thinking of making a new gadget to allow a little more flexibility in the location searching.  I don't like being limited to one location.

But how does a job board enhance our goal to do collaboration?  It sounds a bit one-way at the moment.

[Warren Vail]

OK, I believe leads from craigslist is included in indeed.com.  Keep in mind that craigslist is an email feed, and not an rss feed (different technology), at least that’s the way I remember it.  Allowing users to custom tailor the feed on our site is probably not a good idea, since you are allowing someone control over your site content, unless we can establish enough control over what they can select and I don’t think the basic aggregator works that way.  Last thing you want is someone coming to your site and adding lap dancing jobs to the search criterion for everyone else to see on your site.  What is actually more likely is some spammer may find the page and try to figure a way to cause his product pages to be added to the list thru the customizations.  Perhaps a safer solution is to provide a link that sends visitors to indeed.com if they don’t see openings they are interested in on our site.  There are also some optimizing functions that would need to be bypasses to allow users to alter what can be seen.

 

The aggregation module in Drupal performs a query against the rss feed on a periodic basis, say, every hour or so, then copies the rss content to the local Drupal DB and any page requests, retrieves from the local DB store, until the next query time instead of hitting the feed server with every single page request on hosted sites.  Now I seem to recall the free feed from indeed was limited to so many feeds per day before it gets shut off.  Spreading them out thru the day works best.

 

Keep in mind that I’m reflecting what I did several years ago and it is possible indeed.com has added some new features we could used to spread the geographic areas and such.  One thing I’d be tempted to use is Geo IP to control the search location (tied to the browser’s geographic location using it’s IP address), not sure that’s a good idea, but let me check on what’s available now.  I can report back on that sometime tomorrow.  http://www.indeed.com, I think they charge for higher number of hits per day.  Feel free to glean what you can from their info pages and we can compare notes tomorrow.

 

Another set of modules I’d recommend is the SEO Checklists.  For the most part, this is an admin only module that guides you through a number of module and option setups that will improve the search engine position of your site.  I’ve used it once and the results were very surprising moving my site to the very top (just below the paid positions) of several, but not all, of the search keywords that are pertinent to the site.  I did this in Drupal 6 but I believe the module is scheduled to be ported to D7, and porting is not as easy as you might think, but we may find that jumping to Drupal 7 which was released just 2 weeks ago, will make this unavailable for a while.  If I had been asked, I’d would have recommended staying on D6 for 3 to 6 months and then upgrading to D7 (this is what I’m doing with my other customers).  I’ll report back on this tomorrow (Thursday) as well.

 

Warren Vail

Vail Systems Technology

war...@vailtech.net

(510) 444-5380

[Warren Vail]

Ok, I stand corrected on the RSS Feed from Craig’s list

 

Found the following; http://drupal.org/node/377258

 

Still checking out indeed.com.

 

Warren Vail

Vail Systems Technology

war...@vailtech.net

(510) 444-5380