A friend of mine was semi-recently laid off from his retail sales job, and I was wondering if I could use any of my knowledgeto help him in his search for jobs. Then it hit me: RSS feeds! I could create an RSS feed of the latest job postings in our area from the sites he checks for jobs. This way he would save time in his search. Since he mainly used craigslist and Washington WorkSource, I only needed to pull feeds from two sites. To keep the RSS feeds relevant, I limited categories pulled. Now there was one minor hitch with this idea.
WorkSource doesn’t provide RSS feeds of any kind! So, I had to write a script that would perform searches in the relevant categories and then create an RSS-like xml file from that.
Once that hurdle was cleared, this became a simple matter of collecting the feeds in Yahoo! Pipes, eliminating duplicates, truncating the feed, and giving the RSS link to him so that he could subscribe to it in Firefox.
