Quite a while ago, I had an interview for a developer position at Jobing.com.  If you’re unfamiliar, Jobing.com is an online job search community that includes interactive features like forums and blogs.  After the initial interview, I thought I’d try to impress the hiring manager by putting together a widget for Dashboard in OSX that would showcase the “Job of the Day” feature they have displayed on the site for some of their markets.  It was also my first try at widget development, so I thought, if nothing else, I’d learn something.  Unfortunately, I found out that they had found someone else for the job before I had finished.  I thought I’d send the widget anyway, kind of as a “keep me in mind for future positions, and oh, hey, look what I can do” sort of thing.  Apparently it turned out to be more of a “hey, I’m creepy and sending you gifts, so please don’t even acknowledge the receipt of this project I did for you”.  So instead of letting this widget go to waste, telling only me about the different jobs of the day featured on Jobing.com’s site, please allow me to share it with you.

Description

Dashboard widgets are much like web pages, using HTML, Javascript and CSS as the basis for their functionality.  This widget accepts a zip code or a city and state on the back admin panel and uses that information to find your local Jobing.com site using cURL and jQuery.  The widget then scrapes the page for the “Job of the Day” feature and displays it on the front panel.  Easy.  Except that Jobing.com’s web developers didn’t do me any favors where the markup is concerned.  If they ever clean up their code, then I’ll have to make a new release, but let’s not hold our breath.  I can testify, based on personal knowledge, how difficult it can be to change established page code on a large site like Jobing.com.

Screenshots

The images were done by a  friend of mine, Aaron Thomason, who happens to be a graphic designer.  He did a great job, especially considering that I had him re-create the Jobing.com logo, since we couldn’t get our hands on a good source graphic.

Disclaimer: Any and all logos are property of their respective owners.  We are not affiliated with any of the organizations shown here and this is not an official software release from anyone but me.

Download

This widget is for Mac OSX Dashboard only.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

• Jobing.com - 138.48 KB - 153 downloads