A bad week and job feeds
It’s been a bad week:
+ On the way back from Botswana, I started feeling sick. Though the symptoms changed, I wasn’t getting any better. When I went to see a doctor on Wednesday, I was diagnosed with malaria.
Though my blood sample came back negative, it doesn’t mean I *don’t* have malaria. The medication is working well, though.
+ Coming back, at the border, I was given a seven day visa for South Africa. On Thursday, I stood in line at a Home Affairs office for 2.5 hours, without the queue moving *at all*. This is not an exaggeration. Still woozy from both malaria and drugs, I decided to go through an agent.
+ My bank decided to deduct 5000 Rand from my bank account which I did not withdraw.
+ Sitting behind the wheel of my car, sick and very sweaty, I bumped into the car in front of me at on Tuesday, at, like, 5 km/h.
+ Playing around with the online service Tagnics, the crappy service deleted 1800 titles and 1800 descriptions of my photos at Flickr.
DevNetJobs job feeds
A job listing website which I’ve felt ambivalent towards for a while is DevNetJobs. The guy who maintains the service does a good job by providing access to job vacancies in the development sector, many of them high profile.
However, if you, as a job seeker, want to benefit from his service optimally, you have to shelve out quite a bit of money, 44 to 48 dollars for every three months, depending whether you’re on auto-renewal or not. This, according to DevNetJobs, will result in 20 to 25 jobs being delivered to your inbox every day.
What I would want is to have some filtering options on these jobs. I’m not paying for the service, which means that every week or so, I get all jobs in one huge email, sometimes up to 350 individual jobs. As I’m not a paying user, I don’t get to ‘pick first’, but like paying users, I have to sift through each individual job offer to see whether they might apply to me.
What could help, is if these job listings were offered through RSS. Then, using an RSS client, you could set up certain rules which would allow you to only focus on the types of jobs you’re interested in. Also, the website is one of the ugliest out there.
So I figured I’d work a tiny bit of magic using feed43.com, which allows you to generate RSS feeds from web pages.
RSS feed of all jobs, posted on DevNetJobs.org
RSS feed of ICT jobs, posted on DevNetJobs.org
RSS feed of jobs in Geneva, posted on DevNetJobs.org
RSS feed of jobs in India, posted on DevNetJobs.org
As these feeds are the result of web pages being scraped. There’s no guarantee they’ll stay up.