

Show HN: 1MileJobs - enowbi

HN, I have very much appreciated your feedback on variety of issues. Whether it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;1milejobs.com and the app&#x27;s URL is http:&#x2F;&#x2F;1milejobs.com:8080. I appreciate any input I can get. also put up a screenshot video http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;rCCb-DwhLPE if you don&#x27;t have time to signup. Thx.
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jcr
Also, you might want to edit your post. You have:

[http://1milejobs:8080](http://1milejobs:8080)

rather than:

[http://1milejobs.com:8080](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](http://www.designtools.org/pix/1milejobs_app.png)

It looks a better in chromium 24:

[http://www.designtools.org/pix/1milejobs_app_chrome.png](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
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.

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readme
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
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.

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

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dm2
TIL: Cookies are retained across ports, I never even thought about it before.

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

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

~~~
enowbi
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.

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enowbi
Wow, these are the insights we are looking at.

