If you have any additions, comments or corrections please mail them to mdcrawford@gmail.com
If you have a LOT of additions, please permit me to send you an OpenOffice spreadsheet that I've already set up.
I will of course put this all into PostgreSQL but I have never designed a database schema in all of my days, so I've been working out the schema design in my spreadsheet.
While I have managed to come up with several ways to automate most of this, I have as yet been doing all the research and HTML markup completely by hand. While pleasant work, it is quite tedious and time consuming.
As a result I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep lately.
I also have pages with actual payloads for Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Washington and Santa Cruz, California.
My original research technique is lucidly explained in the Santa Cruz page but does not work at all anymore, as hardly anyone ever puts their street address on their business websites!
Over the weekend or so I'll start coding up a Bot that does most of the heavy lifting for me but even so it won't be foolproof I will have to clean up the data quite a bit by hand.
In the long run I will permit anonymous visitors to suggest new entries with the aid of a Captcha as well as manual moderation.
I contemplated allowing each individual employer to register so they could maintain their own entries but in the end decided against it, in part because I'm not really a web developer, and in part to keep a lid on spam.
I have posted about 28 links on my Seattle page, but I have about 120 more in an OpenOffice spreadsheet. However I haven't been getting much sleep at all the least three weeks to I better get some Zs before my eyeballs both start bleeding.
I have a total of 27 separate OOo Calc documents, one for each of the countries I've researched so far. My United States spreadsheet is the most extensive, with a couple dozen states and a couple dozen cities. My Canada spreadsheet has most but not all of the provinces, and most but again not all of the larger cities in the provinces I do have.
I decided the other day to give our friends in Ukraine a leg up, as I know very well that they're heavily into software development, but could only find just one employer, in Kiev. However I have some connections so I will track them all down Real Soon Now.
Please understand that much of my Global Computer Employer Index site consists of mere placeholder pages, so I could work out the overall web design, the directory and document heirarchies, the navigation and the user interface.
I think I've finally got a handle on that, and just now uploaded a new revision, which has quite a lot of work on the navigation, eight or so new countries, many new cities and a few new US states.
I added placeholders for a dozen or so cities in Los Angeles County, as I asked my friend Sari Gennis, a really high-end animator - she was the Art Director for FernGully - to pass my LA County page's link around among her colleagues. I wanted them to see that there really would be something there.
I've had my Santa Cruz County, California page online since 1997, when my former employer Live Picture announced it was moving from scenic, pristine Scotts Valley to San Jose. For most of us LP employees that would mean a treacherous, potentially deadly commute over the Santa Cruz Mountains via Highway 17, so I developed my first software employer research techniques, threw the page up on my site, then quietly passed the link around among my coworkers.
This had the eventual result that some complete stranger emailed to inquire as to my favorite restaurant, then a few days later I received a $100.00 gift certificate, as I had enabled him to find a new coding job!
If you have any additions, comments or corrections please mail them to mdcrawford@gmail.com
If you have a LOT of additions, please permit me to send you an OpenOffice spreadsheet that I've already set up.
I will of course put this all into PostgreSQL but I have never designed a database schema in all of my days, so I've been working out the schema design in my spreadsheet.
While I have managed to come up with several ways to automate most of this, I have as yet been doing all the research and HTML markup completely by hand. While pleasant work, it is quite tedious and time consuming.
As a result I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep lately.
I also have pages with actual payloads for Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Washington and Santa Cruz, California.
My original research technique is lucidly explained in the Santa Cruz page but does not work at all anymore, as hardly anyone ever puts their street address on their business websites!
Over the weekend or so I'll start coding up a Bot that does most of the heavy lifting for me but even so it won't be foolproof I will have to clean up the data quite a bit by hand.
In the long run I will permit anonymous visitors to suggest new entries with the aid of a Captcha as well as manual moderation.
I contemplated allowing each individual employer to register so they could maintain their own entries but in the end decided against it, in part because I'm not really a web developer, and in part to keep a lid on spam.