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Gratuitous Pluggery

The Author is currently on health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of theraputic recovery. So if you've any odd bits of work that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know.

Site News

This site is maintained on a month to month basis, that's when new stuff is added. Links are checked and maintained at this point too.

Real Soon Now

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 It has been replaced by a new search-site, called Jobseekers Direct.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.

[Picture: Closed Jobcentre Plus Office with To-Let
sign]

Cockermouth's former Jobcentre Plus office

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.

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 ZOIS FTP 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.

Releases

The author, Martin Sullivan, writes (on 2010-01-13)

I abandoned the formal release strategy some time ago. And much of this web-site has been on a care and maintenance basis since about 2003. My health sabbatical has exacerbated things and the inertia has been palpable. I have recently been moved, however, to start documenting the little hacks that I've done since then as Technical Notes. The following are relatively recent additions, the date of the TN reflects when the original work was done rather than when I got around to actually writing the TN.

Recently Published TN

Recent, as in the last couple of months or so ...

TN-2009-11-15
Quick and Dirty Ajax (published 2010-03-07).
TN-2010-01-15
The Apple iPhone and Firewalled 'Open' WiFi (published 2010-01-30).
TN-2009-11-30
Drop Capital Paragraphs in HTML (published 2010-01-01).
TN-2009-03-01
Legacy Jacket in PHP (published 2010-01-12).
TN-2007-12-01
SMS Alerts of Important E-mails (published 2010-01-12).
TN-2006-06-01
A Scheme Based Clock (published 2010-01-03).

The Others are Here ...

If you've not already spotted them there are two sister sites (basically being run from the basement of Stag House). The ZOIS Home site is designated as a rapid prototyping site, to show-off little hacks that might be difficult and/or not allowed by our co-location service and ZOIS Ash, which is a sort-of friends-and-family place of ephemera.

Statistics of Sorts

We still get quite a few page requests a month and the logs have been building up. Some lines of Perl later and we can see what pages are the most popular. We'll be posting some stats shortly.

$Date: 2010/03/07 11:06:04 $


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