Domain: catalystrecruiting.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to catalystrecruiting.com.
Comments · 3
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Re:AskGneeves (no joke) -found the original RFCOn my way home today, I had a brainstorm that I want to share with the
/. community. It's an idea for an open-source web project similar to the Open Directory Project. The idea would be to provide search functionality similar to that offered by "Ask Jeeves" - users input english-language questions and then get back a list of potential resources that they could use to find the answer.The problems with Ask Jeeves are two-fold:
1) They only have a few paid editors who try and compile the list of questions and answers
2) They in general only provide a single link to a question that they already know the answer to. Big companies provide big money to make sure that their resource is listed first/exclusively and these big sites are not always the best sources of information. For instance the questions "Where can I buy an Ethernet cable" should take you to a site like Pricewatch and not to CompUSA in order to get the best deal.The Open-source community can solve this problem easily. We allow anyone who wants to to submit question-and-answer pairs, and then we allow end-users to vote (or should we call it moderate?) on which answers are best suited to each question. Thus, the system grows as a result of its users activity, and is not really subject to editorial control. Even less editorial control that Slashdot, believe it or not.
So, here's my question. I am currently too busy with other projects (although one of them such as enzyme.sourceforge.net, the engine that backs Catalyst Recruiting has a lot of related code) to really speahead and maintain this project. I have, however, purchased the domain names that will be necessary to make it work: askgneeves.com (this time the N is silent). Anyone out there interested in working on it? Anyone think it's even a good idea? Is someone already doing this? I think that pretty soon we could have an open-source product that would be useful to 90% of the clueless users out there.
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GOOD JOB!
Replying to myself:
Whoever does your "HTML Programming" needs to learn that White Text on White Background = Invisible!
See it again for the first time! -
PHP _can_ be used for large projects!
I just wanted to make a quick response to the various voices who claim that PHP cannot be used for large projects. I think this is a very misguided viewpoint, and in my experience PHP is a terrific platform for delivering a large site.
I wrote almost all the code for Catalyst Recruiting - a site that helps small, startup, and nonprofit companies find top college students to hire. It's not a gargantuan site, but it handles a fair amount of traffic with a high degree of customization and 99% dynamic content. It was built entirely on Linux using PHP3 and MySQL in roughly two months.
Now, PHP3 has some limitations, and it's OOP model leaves something to be desired, but I have found that it makes it pretty easy to use objects to abstract away the interface from the logic of the program. This enables me to work pretty seamlessly with several design people who don't know PHP from their own ASP.
Of coures, when PHP4/Zend hits, hold on to your hats. Not only will our site be able to render pages with almost the same speed as static content, but the expanded object model will really make life easier.
PHP is a great language for rapid deployment of custom software. I'm so pleased with it, that I'm thinking of open-sourcing the Catalyst software as an add-on to either PHP or PHPLIB. Anyone think that'd be a good or bad idea?
Eric