Hi,
after a long time posting, we are announcing that we have just migrated to a new server.
The previous hosting in dreamhost.com was buggy and crashes very often, for that reason we have migrated to a more powerful server and keep improving the service.
Thanks to all of you, users, admins and fans !
We’re very exited to announce the fully trovit USA integration !
Now, the leader in the search of classified ads in Europe (trovit.com) has reached
the US, and ipsojobs.com is providing them one of the best sources of job offers.
From a week ago, the job offers published in ipsojobs.com are searchable too from jobs.trovit.com
Good luck to trovit.com in this new adventure !!!
We’ve proudly upgraded ipsojobs.com and now we’re
publishing the best job offers worldwide via twitter
you can follow our twitter account in http://twitter.com/ipsojobs
How the ipsojobs twitter looks like
And that’s more, some popular cities have their own twitter account, for example:
New York – http://twitter.com/ij_newyork
Chicago – http://twitter.com/ij_chicago
Barcelona – http://twitter.com/ij_barcelona
Madrid – http://twitter.com/ij_madrid
Alicante – http://twitter.com/ij_alicante
and don’t forget the global account:
The twitter integration doesn’t finish here !
You can now easily, post an interesting ipsojobs offer to your twitter account, simply click the
new link “Share in twitter” in any job offer and share it with your friends.
That’s an example of how the retweet link looks like
Ipsojobs.com is proud to annunce the inclusion in the oodle.com search index.
Oodle ipsojobs integration
Oodle is one of the most important players in the classified ads market globally, this new vertical search engine integration will help Ipsojobs.com to be more popular and more relevant for their users (employeers and jobseekers).
We are receiving visitors from oodle.com since February the 20th (02/20/2009).
Welcome all !
Con el propósito firme de mejorar el servicio, presentamos una nueva funcionalidad dirigidad por ahora a los usuarios de España: hemos integrado información sobre cursos de formación en la mayoría de ciudades españolas.
Tanto en el menú principal como en el encabezado de la lista de ofertas, encontramos una nueva opción: “Cursos”. El menú cursos nos dirige a otra página de ipsojobs.com con un listado de cursos de formación clasificados por categorías.
Esta integración ha sido posible gracias al acuerdo de colaboración realizado con un nuevo partner: Iberestudios. De momento la oferta de formación sólo esta disponible en ciudades españolas pero no descartamos llegar a nuevos acuerdos para ofrecer una oferta de cursos similar en otros paises en un futuro próximo.
Estamos convencidos que la información sobre cursos se complementa perfectamente con las ofertas laborales y sirve para incrementar la calidad de la experiencia de usuario en ipsojobs.
Deseamos que estas modificaciones sean de vuestro agrado. Por supuesto, agradeceremos cualquier comentario o sugerencia al respecto.
saludos!
December starts with a huge activity in UK cities. Our local administrators are doing a great job there and the number of job listings and the number of visits are increasing day by day. We’d like to thank our UK partners for the great job done there.
On the there side, the development team of IPSOJOBS is working in a very interesting integration in order to complement job listings with some other useful information. We’ve planned to launch the new integration by next week. We keep you updated!
It’s been a year since the official launch of ipsojobs.com and we are really proud of the achievements we made in this period.
Let us summarize the major work done in this first year:
Partnerships:
Our major strength rigth now is our partners: we have city admins who control the content at a city level, partners who send us quality job offers and partners who help us to be more findable in their search engines.
SPAM figthing:
One of our main focus is to assure the quality of all jobs postings. Usually the simplicity of the posting process means lots of spam offers. That’s why we have developed a multi-level control system to fight spam. Our software and methodology is working really well so we can keep the site clean and with relevant job offers. This give us a clear competitive advantage in front of some similar sites.
The different levels of spam control are:
Relevance and competition between cities:
We have developed a powerful set of back-office applications to track the performance of all city admins. It allows us to have ‘the pulse’ of Ipsojobs in real time.
We have set some rankings that give to the city admins an idea of their performance related to the other cities.
Even more, we control the relevance of each city in the tagcloud in the worldwide home page, giving more size to the most relevant cities in each area.
SEO:
Every category and every job offer has a relevant and nice URL and the markup is build up to be the most SEO friendly as possible.
We have set links between nearby cities, that allows our job seekers to find jobs in nearby cities and give us automatic cross-linking.
OTHERS:
We have a steady growth, the platform is robust and the business model is solid. Our mid-term goal is to get strong in a couple more of European countries apart from Spain. We have an unique product, an skilled team, a very positive attitude and the support of more than 150 city ambassadors around the globe. With all these ingredients in place we’re sure we’re heading towards a successful and challenging second year !!!
Thank you all for this great 1st year of Ipsojobs!
The summer is already here, almost in Barcelona, today is better to stay in your workplace with the AC than in the street.
For that reason we’ve been working so hard in new features 
Expiration Warnings:
We’ve introduced new warnings when your job posting is about to expire. To use this new feature simply introduce a job posting and then you’ll be asked to fill your contact email.
We’ll send you a link to renew the job posting (if you want) near the end of the publishing period.
When you renew the job posting, you can optionally introduce again an email for a further expiration warning.
Better SEO in Pagination:
The pagination for big cities have become a little bulky, for that reason we’ve simplified the pagination and added a more descriptive title in the links (better than 1, 2, 3 …)
Ultra fast, spam detection for admins:
We’ve set up a new ultra-fast way to remove spammy job postings, we’ll send an email to all the admins telling the secrets of this new feature.
After a few days running a simple CDN in Google App Engine, we’re forced to turn back and wait until Google App Engine are more “mature”.
As you can see in the following image the Google App Engine have got lots of trouble in this June and we cannot afford to lose customers.
For that reason we are now serving again our static content from our servers until the situation in Google App Engine normalizes.
You can follow the google app engine downtimes here
Thank you
The main purpose when I started to look at Google App Engine (3 days ago) was to use it as a “CDN for the rest of us”, a way to cache static content (initially) and have this content distributed along all the infrastructure of Google (maybe the most powerful cloud rigth now)
What we want?:
Hands-on:
The first approach, of course, was to look on Google for some help, the post of Andreas Krohn helped a lot to start.
But I want to go further and take care of modern browsers If-Modified-Since requests, then the google framework and a little of Python comes to the rescue.
Note: I’m assuming you’ve already installed the Python environment and the Google App Engine SDK
First of all let me give you two little .bat files that are useful:
Start the test webserver (test.bat):
dev_appserver.py c:\ipsojobscloud
Upload your application to the cloud (update.bat):
appcfg.py update c:\ipsojobscloud
Note: simply change c:\ipsojobscloud for the folder you are working in and contains your app.yaml
Then I’ve setup the app.yaml, it’s very simple (16 lines):
application: ipsojobscloud version: 1 runtime: python api_version: 1 handlers: - url: /favicon.ico static_files: favicon.ico upload: favicon.ico - url: /images/favicon.ico static_files: favicon.ico upload: favicon.ico - url: /.* script: cacheheaders.py
This app.yaml simply tells the GAE the name of the application (ipsojobscloud) the version we’re working on (use only the major release number, GAE automatically takes care of the .x when you upload).
Then we specify two handlers for the favicon.ico static file and a catch-all handler that redirects our requests to the Python script cacheheaders.py
With that environment set, we simply code the cacheheaders.py file, let’s see it in detail:
The skeleton of the file is:
import wsgiref.handlers from google.appengine.ext import webapp class MainPage(webapp.RequestHandler): def get(self, dir, file, extension): ... def main(): application = webapp.WSGIApplication([(r'/(.*)/([^.]*).(.*)', MainPage)], debug=False) wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application) if __name__ == "__main__": main()
Here we are importing the webapp framework and setting the class MainPage, in the main section the only change in the sample GAE is
the regular expression that we used to match our requests, the expression r’/(.*)/([^.]*).(.*)’ is telling that we are using regular expressions (r)
, then take one slash, followed by an arbitray number of characters and another slash /(.*)/ the parentesis tells the regular expression to keep the string beetween the two slashes as a variable. The next part ([^.]*). takes all caracters except a dot and puts them in to the second variable and finally, we’ll take the rest of the input as a variable with (.*)
This regular expression is designed to only capture paths like /images/helloworld.gif where variables are images, helloworld and gif respectively
Note: Of course that’s not a complete solution, we can only have one folder depth, but it’s a good readers exercice to improve that
The part that you need to know is that when a request arrives it’s mapped to the get function with the parameters dir, file and extension (and don’t forget the first “self” parameter)
Let’s see the code of the get function in detail:
First, check the validity of the parameters received and set the correct content-type based on the extension:
def get(self, dir, file, extension):
if (dir!='js' and dir!='css' and dir!='images'):
self.error(404)
return
if (extension!='js' and extension!='css' and extension!='jpg' and extension!='png' and extension!='gif'):
self.error(404)
return
if extension=='js':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/x-javascript'
elif extension=='css':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/css'
elif extension=='jpg':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'image/jpeg'
elif extension=='gif':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'image/gif'
elif extension=='png':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'image/png'
Note: the firts two ifs are completely optional, we check if the dir variable is in our valid list of dirs (js, css, images) and if the extension of the file is in our allowed list (js, css, jpg, png, gif), you have to change that check or completely remove it at your convenience.
And now the tricky part:
try:
import os
import datetime
path = dir+'/'+file+"."+extension
info = os.stat(path)
lastmod = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(info[8])
if self.request.headers.has_key('If-Modified-Since'):
dt = self.request.headers.get('If-Modified-Since').split(';')[0]
modsince = datetime.datetime.strptime(dt, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")
if modsince >= lastmod:
# The file is older than the cached copy (or exactly the same)
self.error(304)
return
else:
# The file is newer
self.output_file(path, lastmod)
else:
self.output_file(path, lastmod)
except:
self.error(404)
return
First we import some packages (os, datetime), then create a variable “path” with the full path of the file we want to retrieve
path = dir+'/'+file+"."+extension
Then, take the info of the file from the Operating System and keep the last modified date into lastmod variable, note that if an error occurs (non existing file for example, the except part will be executed, returning a 404 not found response to the browser).
In the following lines we scan the headers of the request, looking for an If-Modified-Since header, if we found it take the date part
if self.request.headers.has_key('If-Modified-Since'):
dt = self.request.headers.get('If-Modified-Since').split(';')[0]
modsince = datetime.datetime.strptime(dt, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")
Then compare the last modification date of the file against the ifmodifiedsince date and act accordingly, note that self.error(304) will return a response code 304 (Not-Modified) to the browser:
if modsince >= lastmod:
# The file is older than the cached copy or the same
self.error(304)
return
else:
# The file is newer
self.output_file(path, lastmod)
The self.output_file(path, lastmod) is a function we have defined to avoid code duplication:
def output_file(self, path, lastmod):
import datetime
try:
self.response.headers['Cache-Control']='public, max-age=31536000'
self.response.headers['Last-Modified'] = lastmod.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")
expires=lastmod+datetime.timedelta(days=365)
self.response.headers['Expires'] = expires.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")
fh=open(path, 'r')
self.response.out.write(fh.read())
fh.close
return
except IOError:
self.error(404)
return
As you can see we imported datetime to manipulate dates and try to do the following:
Note: If something happens we returned an standard response of Not Found (404)
Conclusions:
We’ve improved the latency in the requests of static files putting them into the cloud, and keep the bandwidth used in the cloud to a minimum answering correctly to the If-Modified-Since requests and only in about 70 lines of code
One of the advantatges of Google App Engine above Amazon S3 is that GAE is free up 5 million page views a month, that give us a good chance to try this kind of features without spending cash.
You can see the speed improvement on-line in all the ipsojobs.com pages rigth now !
Some screenshots taken from firebug:
First request:
Second request:
Detail of a request:
Full source of cacheheaders.py:
import wsgiref.handlers
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
class MainPage(webapp.RequestHandler):
def output_file(self, path, lastmod):
import datetime
try:
self.response.headers['Cache-Control']='public, max-age=31536000'
self.response.headers['Last-Modified'] = lastmod.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")
expires=lastmod+datetime.timedelta(days=365)
self.response.headers['Expires'] = expires.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")
fh=open(path, 'r')
self.response.out.write(fh.read())
fh.close
return
except IOError:
self.error(404)
return
def get(self, dir, file, extension):
if (dir!='js' and dir!='css' and dir!='images'):
self.error(404)
return
if (extension!='js' and extension!='css' and extension!='jpg' and extension!='png' and extension!='gif'):
self.error(404)
return
if extension=='js':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/x-javascript'
elif extension=='css':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/css'
elif extension=='jpg':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'image/jpeg'
elif extension=='gif':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'image/gif'
elif extension=='png':
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'image/png'
try:
import os
import datetime
path = dir+'/'+file+"."+extension
info = os.stat(path)
lastmod = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(info[8])
if self.request.headers.has_key('If-Modified-Since'):
dt = self.request.headers.get('If-Modified-Since').split(';')[0]
modsince = datetime.datetime.strptime(dt, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")
if modsince >= lastmod:
# The file is older than the cached copy (or exactly the same)
self.error(304)
return
else:
# The file is newer
self.output_file(path, lastmod)
else:
self.output_file(path, lastmod)
except:
self.error(404)
return
def main():
application = webapp.WSGIApplication([(r'/(.*)/([^.]*).(.*)', MainPage)], debug=False)
wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
© Omatech