Articles

How to build a custom RSS (to help you to save time during your job search)

by Elena Bubelich, Head Editor, INALJ Quebec

How to build a custom RSS
(to help you to save time during your job search)

1047_1Everyone knows how long it could be to search in or to check a multitude of sites offering information about jobs. For example, almost every day I check near 30 sites with job offers for my page INALJ Quebec. But luckily for me there are some free web tools that help me to save time and to optimize my search. And one of them is Yahoo! Pipes that allows you “to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web” (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/).

What does it mean in different terms? If you are subscribed to some or many RSS feeds, you know that usually they contain heterogeneous information. It means that they often contain information you are not really interested in. With Yahoo! Pipes you may combine as many RSS feeds as you want in a custom one and filter out the information you only need to know.

Let me show how it could help you during your job search. I’ll take as an example Quebec Municipalities’ Web site which offers a good RSS of ALL jobs in all municipalities around Quebec. It’s evident that if I subscribe to this RSS, I’ll have too much irrelevant information and I’ll need to trudge through it to find suitable jobs. So I’ve entrusted Yahoo! Pipes with it which combines and filter 9 RSS feeds. As a result, I have this list and I can get its RSS URL and then read it in any RSS aggregator (by the way, trying to find a substitute for Google Reader, I test now Feedly, NetVibes and The Old Reader).

So, what do you need to do to start your custom RSS at Yahoo! Pipes? Firstly, open Yahoo! Account if you don’t have one. Secondly, watch this YouTube tutorial that explains how to build your pipes. Thirdly, create a new pipe, save it, take its URL, add this URL to your RSS aggregator and wait for automatic updating.

If you have any question about Yahoo! Pipes, I’ll be glad to help you, write at elena.etud.ebsi at gmail dot com.

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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