ZOIS's Home Web-Server

Stag House, Kirkgate

Welcome to ZOIS Home web-site. This site is visible from the Internet at large and is used for demonstrations. One of those demonstrations has rather grown, and now is considered a valuable resource, the Unofficial Jobcentre Plus Mirror Database.

Find: 

Example: "painters or plumbers in wakefield".

ZOIS itself is a small consultancy specializing in large UNIX and Java based On-Line Transaction Processing systems. We would encourage you to read the papers on the ZOIS public site. They give more detailed information on what we do. ZOIS Limited is registered in England, Number 2197775. Although ZOIS is based in Cockermouth, the registered office is 22-26 Nottingham Road, Stapleford, Nottingham NG9 8AA.

Technology Demonstrators

The primary reason for the 'home' site was to allow demonstrations to be deployed rapidly with the hope of impressing clients and potential clients. Only a few have a link to the front page ...

Jobcentre Plus and Jobseekers Direct Scraping

Originally this was work done in an indignant response to the closure of the local Jobcentre Plus office, here in Cockermouth. It has been expanded nationally and now the whole of the UK (excluding Northern Ireland). Vacancy details are scraped off various web-sites and stored as a set of files that can be downloaded from our ftp site. There's more explanation elsewhere.

Nationally, we've found that searching a particular Jobcentre office's vacancies yields better local results than the official Postcode based effort. Search for your local Jobcentre office in the form on the right, 'Navigation', or below if your page is narrow. Type your location in to this form (the first part of Postcodes are acceptable) and we'll try and find your local Jobcentre office. From there a cornucopia of vacancies awaits.

As yet, the web interface extends only to England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland's official web-site doesn't do that bad job, and we'll leave them to it. In addition there's a canned web-site query for the area around Cockermouth, and an explanation.

Ask us nicely, and we'll send you the results of our scraping automagically each night. This work currently in a state of flux and is completely under-resourced. So, be gentle with it.

This Demonstration uses Linux, GNU, Perl, LWP, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP, CSS and RSS. As ever, the primary development environment was Emacs.

Some Technical Notes have been made on the nitty-gritty of these things:

TN-2010-11-11

The Jobcentre Plus Mirror Find Interface.

TN-2010-02-17

'Click-through' on Stateful Third Party Web-sites Using PHP.

TN-2009-11-15

Quick and Dirty Ajax.

Looking for the ZoisClock Java J2ME program? This has has now been written up as a Technical Note (TN-2009-10-01) and removed from here. Follow the links in the TN to find it.

Thank you for your interest.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Jobcentre Plus Mirror Search

We've two search interfaces to the database. One based on the local Jobcentre Plus office and the other on an ad-hoc search.

Find your local office: 

Example: "chester".

Or, alternatively, try typing this kind of query: something in somewhere. Everything's optional. Experiment!

Find: 

Example: "painters or plumbers in wakefield".

Please send feedback about these searches.

Also of Interest

Juicy morsels from the rest of the site:

• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for the author too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, the author can still bore people in the Historic Third-person.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.