Many people thought that WikiStudent was run by a team of people, and I don’t blame them: I used the “royal we” on the site, and the natural assumption is to think that “we” is more than one person.
But it was just me, and it still is, though this time round I’m making it much easier for myself to manage!
Here are some more examples of emails I got through the “Contact Us” form:
I am looking for a male UNISA student who lives in the Edenvale area of Johannesburg. The following would be required of the candidate…
I need your price list on your text books I want to study library science. Its urgent please
Did people think there was a whole department dedicated to dealing with jobs, and another department for the bookshop? Clicking on the job links took you to a different website (Gumtree) and clicking on the book images took you to a different website (Loot), yet I was contacted instead of these websites. I swear, some people shouldn’t be using a modem 
Anyway, I spent over an hour this evening finishing off the Jobs page (16 feeds in total are being used) and I’m thinking of including text that says you should place your ad on Gumtree if you want it to appear on WikiStudent. I really hate giving instructions like “Click on the link to view the job and contact the advertiser directly” because instructions must die!
Oh, and the Jobs section is following the same structure as the Unisa Modules section: There is a “Student Jobs” category, which gets assigned to each of the degree pages (BA, BCom, BSc, and LLB) and yes, this calls for breadcrumbs again. Yay.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and basically it allows you to pull data from other sites into your own website or RSS reader. If you see the following icon on a website, it means the website owner is allowing / inviting you to do this:
The old WikiStudent had a ‘Student jobs’ page which was quite popular, so I’m going to have one again, and pull jobs from Gumtree again, by using their RSS links.
Last night I installed the MediaWiki SimpleFeed extension and within minutes I had Gumtree jobs appearing on my local test wiki. Like the name says, it’s really simple! Here’s a quick screengrab of some sample feed output:
If you click on a blue link (notice the arrow, indicating that it is an external link to a page not on the wiki) you will arrive at the full job description page on Gumtree.
Looks like I’ll need to make some tweaks to the default settings, and I also need to sort the feeds into sections (BA, BCom, BSc, LLB…) and cities (Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town…).
What I love about using Gumtree’s feeds is that I can have the latest jobs on WikiStudent without having to do any manual updates. Their feeds take care of sending me up-to-the-second content in jobs 