Capturing postings

Rather than retyping an advert, paste its address and let Postulo read the page.

Capture a posting, on the dashboard.

What happens

1. Postulo fetches the one page you pasted.
2. It reads what it can — usually from the structured data the site publishes about itself for search engines.
3. It shows you the result in the posting form, for you to correct.
4. Nothing is recorded until you save it — and what you save is a listing, something noticed and not yet decided about. Tick I have already applied to this one and it becomes an application straight away.

That fourth step is not a formality. A parser reading markup it has never seen gets things wrong, and a job title invented by a computer is exactly the sort of error you would not spot six weeks later. Everything captured waits at the top of the Listings page until you have looked at it.

What it can read

Structured data. Most large job boards embed a machine-readable description of the posting for search engines. Postulo reads that. When a site provides it you get the title, company, location, working arrangement, employment type, salary range, posting date and closing date, all filled in.

Whatever else the page says about itself. With no structured data, Postulo takes the page title and its readable text and leaves the rest to you. Less impressive, still less typing than starting from nothing.

Where a field cannot be determined it is left empty rather than guessed. A blank box invites you to type; a confidently wrong value has to be noticed before it can be corrected.

What it will not do

• It does not crawl. One page is fetched: the one you pasted. Postulo never follows links looking for more.
• It honours robots.txt. If a site asks automated clients not to fetch a page, Postulo does not. Copy the text in by hand instead.
• It refuses private addresses. Anything resolving to a loopback, private or link-local address is declined, and every redirect is rechecked. Postulo usually runs on a network with a router and a NAS on it, and a box that fetches any address you type is a way to go looking at them.
• It gives up quickly. Ten seconds, two megabytes, three redirects.

When the site refuses

Large employers frequently sit behind bot protection that turns away anything which is not a browser. You will see something like:

The site refused the request (403). Large sites often sit behind bot protection that turns away anything that is not a browser, even when the page is perfectly visible to you. Paste the page source in below instead.

The advert is on your screen and unreachable from your server at the same time, and that is not a contradiction: the block is aimed at automated clients in general, not at you.

Postulo does not pretend to be a browser to get around it. Disguising the request would be dishonest, and it would also break robots.txt handling, which matches on the name a client gives — so the polite thing and the correct thing happen to agree.

Paste the page source instead. On the capture page, open The site refuses Postulo, or the posting needs a login:

1. Open the posting in your browser.
2. View the page source (Ctrl+U in most browsers) and select all of it.
3. Paste it into the box, along with the address.

Postulo reads what you paste and fetches nothing. Your browser was already allowed to see the page, so there is nothing to refuse.

The same route works for postings behind a login, and for pages built entirely by JavaScript — in the second case, use your browser's developer tools to copy the rendered HTML rather than the original source, since the source will not contain the advert.

This is exactly what the planned browser extension will automate.

When nothing can be read at all

If a page carries no structured data and no usable title, use Add a listing on the Listings page and type it in — or Record an application if you have already applied. Same forms, without the pre-filling.

Captures waiting for you

At the top of the Listings page, and counted on the dashboard.

Each capture can be reviewed — which opens the pre-filled form — or discarded. Saving one creates the listing and links the two, so the record shows where it came from.

Triage is built for forty at a time. Tick the ones a glance at the title rules out and press Discard the ticked ones; open the rest. The review page says how many are still waiting and moves on by itself: Save and next and Discard and next beside the plain buttons, and Skip to the next for one you cannot decide yet — a skipped capture comes round again at the end. Three keys do what those buttons do, while nothing is being typed: d discards and moves on, j skips, Ctrl+Enter saves and moves on.

d and j are single keys, and a single key is not always welcome — dictating to your computer presses every letter of every sentence, and d discards a capture without asking. So they can be switched off, under Settings → Appearance → Keyboard shortcuts, together with the / that jumps to the search box. Ctrl+Enter is not a single key and is never switched off. The line under the buttons says which keys you actually have, so a page never offers you one you have turned off.

A currency or salary period the page never stated is marked as a default beside the box. Boards write a currency into every advert with no amount behind it, and Postulo does not repeat that as a reading.

Capturing from elsewhere

An instance can accept captures from outside: a script, a keyboard shortcut, or the browser extension planned for later. See The capture API.

Teaching Postulo about a particular site

If a board you use often is read badly, a plugin can be written for it and installed without changing Postulo or waiting for anyone. See Writing a plugin.

The capture page lists which sources are installed.