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News on little projects that we're involved in that may come to fruition soon, later, or never. It all depends upon what seizes our imagination and if any enthusiasm can be found under the heaps of lassitude found on the desk in front of us. Maybe there's some enthusiasm down the back of the sofa. Who knows?
- National Unofficial JCP Site (7 March 2010)
- It was inevitable that after the FTP national feed was presumed stable that some code would be hacked up to allow you to find your very own local UK Jobcentre Plus Office and thence to find out what's been posted there (in an arbitrary 48 hour period). There's more national explanation too.
- Unofficial Cockermouth JCP Site Updates (17 February 2010)
- The current Jobcenter Plus (JCP) search-site is to close shortly
(next month). It has been replaced by a new search-site, called Jobseekers Direct. You'll
no-doubt be interested to read that it's as abysmal in finding jobs as
the old one. This means that we've had to do some programming to scrape
the new site and that's all
working now. Along the way I've found time to add a 'Twitter' and
'Facebook' share links. You can now note and recommend an individual
vacancy on these social web-sites. There's a new link that allows you
to view the original posting on the Jobseekers Direct web-site too.
To all you aspiring Lynne Truss-types out there, 'Jobseekers Direct' seems to be the official spelling. No apostrophes.
- A National Jobcentreplus Feed (21 February 2010)
- We scrape so you don't have to. As may have been observed on a sister-site, a demonstration
involving scraping the Jobcentreplus web-site, cleaning out the
irrelevant and presenting a list of real jobs on a somewhat retro-looking page
seems to have garnered some positive feed-back. We've thought about
enhancing this to be useful to others outside Cockermouth.
To this end we've started scraping nationally, trying to get all the postings in a day. We're happy that its stable and working so we've start putting the days scrapings on our FTP site as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file for your nightly anonymous ftping pleasure. We'll also be happy to e-mail all or chunks of this to you on a nightly basis too. E-mail me, Martin Sullivan (ms10@zois.co.uk) to set that up.![[Picture: Closed Jobcentre Plus Office with To-Let
sign]](http://home.zois.co.uk/small_cockermouth_jobcentre.jpg)
Cockermouth's former Jobcentre Plus office The job-postings are geographically tied to a Local Office, signified by their three-letter code. This seems to be significantly more accurate than Post Code in identifying a job's particular locality. We're still trying to identify all the real offices and their addresses against this code, but we've publish what we've got now. We'd encourage others to produce their own unofficial Jobcentre mirrors. We'll help with code, assistance, Technical Notes and encouragement in variable amounts. These files, together with attended README files can be found on the JCP part of the
ZOISFTP site.In time, we'll almost certainly accumulate a sizeable amount of historic data. We've only just started (2010-01-25) so all you budding SPSS-ers out there will need to bear with us for a little while. Incidentally, the author knows some hitherto undisclosed GNU-R and may be able to help in that department too.
Finally, to prove I'm not a dinosaur, I've put a Facebook Fan Page up on this, as an experiment but also to allow discussion and feedback. It has all of one fan, me.
- Older Than This
- Site Archaeology can be found in the Old Releases page.