App I'm re-writing, would love input!

[eluser]awpti[/eluser]
Howdy, folks.

I've had IgnitedJobs.com for about a year now and even built a small, free-for-all job posting board. It never saw use since I never spent time "spreading the word". Recently, I started working with another CI addict in doing two things:

Rewriting IJ from the ground up (Initial version is a mess, it was written in an hour or so)
Adding new features.

So; synopsis:

Free-for-all job posting board specific to the tech industry and more specifically, to the higher end development and engineering jobs.

Here are the features we have planned:

Job Location (By City/State only)

Job Types:
* Shorty (fixer-upers)
* Contract (Temporary or Contract-to-Hire Only)
* "Real" Jobs (Permanent/Direct-to-Hire only)

General Categories, eg;
* DB Administrator
* Programmer
* Network Administrator (etc)

Tags (Compliments the general categries) eg;
You pick "Programmer" and tag it as: "OOP", "PHP", "XHTML"

RSS/ATOM Feed will take options such as:

/rss/?state=Arizona&city=Phoenix&category=DBAdmin&tags=tag1,tag2,tag3

It will also tweet new jobs based on the type;

ijshorty for Fixer-uppers
ijcontract for Contracts
ijreal for.. real jobs.

Tweet format will probably be:

City,State - Title - URL

Job postings will last 90 days at most and then be auto-pruned from the DB.

There are no logins required, each new post gets a unique URL defined by the validation key + a passphrase. So, even if someone guesses your edit URL (eg: /edit/special_key), they still need your passphrase to finalize edits.

Posts can be:
Deleted
Edited
Renewed (but only within 3 days of expiration, it brings the posting back to the front).

So.. feedback? Any other features you guys would love to see? Note that this project's only relation to Codeigniter is the framework it will rely upon. This is not a special, CI-only posting board.

Can't wait to hear from ya'll!

[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
One thing that bugs me about many job sites is that they allow you to sort posts by distance, but then they show posts with a distance (in miles) of "5+", even if you select "within 5 miles". Am I making sense?

So I suggest you require posts to include the job zip code, and seekers would enter their zip code. The results should provide an accurate distance between zips.

CI member 'Iverson' has an interesting zip code library that computes distances between zips for you. You can get it here -> http://www.gandylabs.com/ci/

EDIT: I see now you're planning on listing by city/state only, does that mean you'll only be listing by metro areas? It really makes it difficult for people in smaller cities when they can only find posts for jobs 100 miles away. Some of those jobs may even be close to the seeker, but because city selection is limited they end up getting posted as if they were in the metro area.

P.S. I'm a native English speaker and I myself think my sentences don't make sense sometimes

[eluser]awpti[/eluser]
The idea behind looking for jobs in a certain city is simple.. you know how far away it is. Approximately, at least.

I may add "By County" into it, since I have a fairly comprehensive list of cities/towns, and the counties they are in. So, perhaps add one more item to the RSS/ATOM list: ?county=maricopa (or whatever).

That may be something to implement in the future, but in the job market these days, distance is not a huge deal. You aren't going to search for a job in Phoenix when you live in Seattle unless you're moving there.

I'll definitely require a zip code, that's a good point and can make adding that feature later much easier.

I may even extend the "api" to allow a comma separated list of cities (say, 2-3 max). This will allow for a bit broader search. Adding "By county" in there will be huge, I think.

[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
But by restricting searches to city, there is no computable way to provide the job seeker with the distance between the job and their home. Not everyone knows all of their surrounding cities. Your job search will require the seeker to use a mapping site while searching if they're concerned at all with the distance, and if the job seeker is checking out 20 different listings, that's a lot of extra work.

There are a lot of different scenarios where this would be important, too. For one, job seekers considering relocating to find work may have a a specific place they've chosen to move, and will want to see what jobs are available within a given number of miles.

As our transportation infrastructure changes, this will become more and more important as people will begin to rely more on walking to work, riding their bike, public transportation.

In my opinion, it seems too easy of a feature to implement to leave it out. I don't know of any jobs search sites that don't allow search by zip code with a settable max-distance.

[eluser]awpti[/eluser]
Good argument.

Consider it added for the first or second beta run.

[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
Sweet! Now if only you could find me a really good job!

[eluser]awpti[/eluser]
Haha.

Wish I could find everyone a job. Maybe this will make it a bit easier since posts to IJ will always be free. Hopefully I can handle this mess of features on my own. It'll be my first time delving into RSS/ATOM feeds and handling queued API (twitter and bit.ly) calls.

Rest of it, I've done in one form or another.

[eluser]Sonolin[/eluser]
To expand upon what slowgary was talking about - you may be able to use the Google Maps API somehow so a person can easily see surrounding cities. I'm not sure if Google Maps allows this (never worked with it before), but you may be able to implement some sort of AJAX query if a user selects a city. So, say somebody is looking around at the cities, if that person clicks on a city the search results are AJAX-omatically updated.

Just throwing the idea out there