Show HN: 1MileJobs

4 points by enowbi 11 years ago | 11 comments

HN, I have very much appreciated your feedback on variety of issues. Whether it's bitcoin or flappy bird, I have always come back to HN to gain insightful knowledge from comments. Me and my buddy have been working on a project for a while now. It's 1milejobs. Our primary audience is people for whom distance to a job location is the deal breaker. These might be either because of commuting costs or young people for whom it's safer to work close to home. Granted, one would be very lucky to find a 60K job within a couple of miles radius, it boils down to mostly low-paying jobs. On the good side, these are commodity jobs that can be produced and consumed by anyone. The website address is http://1milejobs.com and the app's URL is http://1milejobs.com:8080. I appreciate any input I can get. also put up a screenshot video http://youtu.be/rCCb-DwhLPE if you don't have time to signup. Thx.

jcr 11 years ago |

Also, you might want to edit your post. You have:

http://1milejobs:8080

rather than:

http://1milejobs.com:8080

The first thing I noticed was the use of "mile" in your domain and company name. Using "mile" is problematic since most of the world is on the metric system. I fired up a thesaurus to augment the tiny amount of imagination I have for this kind of thing, but the best suggestions I came up with that weren't already registered were:

No match for "NEIGHBORINGJOBS.COM"

No match for "CLOSEBYJOBS.COM"

Sadly, tons of domains with "jobs" in it are already taken.

Your faq says you've tested with recent browsers, but you need to put some effort into maintaining support for older browsers (yes, I know it's a pain, but such is web development). The following screen shot was done on Firefox 18:

http://www.designtools.org/pix/1milejobs_app.png

It looks a better in chromium 24:

http://www.designtools.org/pix/1milejobs_app_chrome.png

In Chromium, when loading over a slow-ish Internet connection, there's a flash of a set of icons with titles, but they disappear behind the above. I don't want to poke at it, but I'd bet if I toggled visibility, I might find something that you don't want accessible.

For your initial app display, I'd use geo-location to get the general location of the visitor, and display a few listings from that area, even a wider area than one mile if need be.

It's an interesting concept. Good Luck!

enowbi 11 years ago | |

Thanks jcr for the comments. 1 mile is the goal. Not the starting point. I have not restricted the distance from the beginning until I get critical mass.

I agree, it's really a pain to maintain older browsers.

readme 11 years ago |

I like the concept, but the interface is not usable. You chose to try to make it cool instead of usable. Just make it more normal. The kinds of people who will be using your website will not be comfortable with the interface.

Start the app with content first, the first thing I should see is the data on jobs around me that you have. It should try to look up my location using any available APIs. Whether mobile GPS apis, or looking up the location via geoip at the worst. Then, it should let me enter my location for finer grained selection.

If you need data for the jobs you could scrape other websites or something. The user should be able to add jobs too. Start it for free then when your site becomes popular you can charge them to post.

Just because it's called 1 mile jobs doesn't mean you can't have other ranges. Let the user select to expand this.

You will want to look into using a stored procedure for checking the radius against other geolocations. In server side code it will be too slow.

Don't color the radio button in solid black. It just makes it look broken. Use typical and idiomatic colors and patterns that users expect. If you're not a design god, then use a bootstrap 3 or foundation theme.

You need to have hover effects and click effects when a link is engaged. This lets the user know something is clickable. I almost thought I couldn't click your buttons. When I did, the first time I didn't press the mouse hard enough and it made me think it wasn't even a working button.

The text is too close to the icons on the bottom. It is hard to look at.

enowbi 11 years ago | |

readme, Thanks for the extensive feedback. On the content, I now have indeed publisher account to get the data legally and even earn commission. CL doesn't expose any public API and their TOS explicitly bans screen scraping.

Some of the issues on the UI is because I am using app framework which promises it working on most mobile devices.

If it were just web, I would go with bootstrap.

enowbi 11 years ago | |

Mongodb has one good thing, excellent geospatial queries. I am taking advantage of that. Its the only reason that I picked mongodb.

brent_noorda 11 years ago |

Love love love the concept. Commutes suck. Employees that live nearby are happier and don't leave. Let's all walk to work.

In reality, if you aren't tapping into the existing job listings (e.g. linkedin or even craigslist), and instead require jobs posters to use your site, you'll never get the critical mass to keep this going.

enowbi 11 years ago | |

Thanks @brent_noorda, I am aware of this. I am thinking of modifying the code to do that. CL is such an inspiration!

dm2 11 years ago |

TIL: Cookies are retained across ports, I never even thought about it before.

Oh yeah, awesome concept (the 1milejobs thing).

fiatjaf 11 years ago |

It starts with user registration? Why not make it work without registration?

enowbi 11 years ago | |

This application needs userid for many other additional functionality and so has to track who the user is. That has always been the reason why logins are needed in applications. If you just doing a onetime request like a google search then no login is needed. Even a simple blog requires login to track your comments. Thats the way the web goes. Thats until someone comes up with a solution like single-sign-on.

enowbi 11 years ago |

Wow, these are the insights we are looking at.