Jobserve now provides its own customised RSS feeds, largely rendering this obsolete.

So you're looking for a new programming job. Maybe you're a contractor, perhaps you've just got itchy feet. There are scads of jobs being advertised on Jobserve, but frankly it's a pain in the backside checking it all the time. Well, through the power of software, you can have this little script do the checking for you. It scrapes Jobserve, generating an RSS feed of the jobs you're interested in. Point your favourite RSS aggregator at it and Bob's your mother's brother. Fresh job ads, delivered to your desktop.

This is a simple Perl script which queries Jobserve, picks apart the HTML with a set of regexes, then glues it all back together as an RSS 0.91 document. You'll need to edit the query string in the fetch_jobserve_list function by copying and pasting the search URL from your browser - it comes configured to find C++ or Java contracts. Set it up to run periodically (via a cron job, Windows scheduler, whatever) and that's it. The script includes code to ftp the RSS feed to another box. If you don't need to do that, just comment out the call to do_ftp.

Download
jobscrape.gz (1118 bytes)
jobscrape.zip (1246 bytes)
These files were uploaded on 28 March 2003.

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dewd - aren't you encouraging the opposition with this kind of thing ?
by AngryJohn [e] on 8th Jan 2003

greate idea, thanks for sharing
by steve on 19th Feb 2003

the script works cool, mostly, but sometimes the rss items instead of having a job description have the following text HASH(0x9b1a4e4)

where the hexadecimal number appears to be different each time, any idea what this could be?
by steve on 19th Feb 2003

i figured it out, jobserve had some dodgy characters in the description text, i solved the problem by wrapping the text of the description in a cdata tag.
by steve on 19th Feb 2003

Steve, your fix is now in the release. Thanks.
by jez on 28th Mar 2003

if you run the script under warnings you get two of them. When you declare a subroutine (not when you call it, thats anoother kettle of fish) you should only use ()'s if you have an explicit prototype otherwise the interpreter will complain. You probably also want to check the open in write_temp_file in case it fails.
by Dean Wilson on 8th Sep 2003

Good point about the subroutine.

I chose to ignore the write_temp_file, because the script is only useful when run regularly. So, if the temp file creation fails, the script will be run again and eventually it'll write the file and it'll all kick back into life.

by jez on 9th Sep 2003

Why not host this RSS file on your site and support it with advertising?
by Terris on 19th Jun 2004

Short answer - can't be bothered.

Better answer - It's almost certainly against Jobserve's terms of service to republish their adverts. It'd be ethically dubious too. Publishing customised RSS feeds is something I think they should do, and would improve the utility of their site a great deal. There seems to be no sign of that happening though, so I don't have any particular qualms about scraping their site for personal use. I've found many of my contracts via Jobserve over the past several years. Scraping them into my RSS reader just makes it easier for me to see the relevant ads. Helping a few other people to do that same thing I don't see as a bad thing. Republishing their data for money? Nah ...
by jez on 28th Jun 2004

Well they said it, they have no previous experience in business!! http://www.jobserve.com/AboutJobServe.aspx We have to find a way to make job searching easy!
by Noel Peters [e] [w] on 30th Jun 2005

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