Loopo is a fairly small operation, at least in global terms, so we always welcome efficient low cost ways to recruit new employees. Years ago we used to try sites like Monster and CW Jobs, but frankly they’re expensive and all we tended to see was non geographically relevant candidates and offshore outsourcing companies taking the scattergun approach. To put this into perspective, I was recently talking to a manager at a national charity, who uses Reed’s online recruitment service. This allows you to see how many pending job applications there are per candidate, and he tells me it is not unheard of for candidates to make over 400 applications simultaneously. Clearly this is a nonsense in terms of fielding quality candidates, so why bother?

Instead, we found that gumtree.com yielded a higher quality candidate, in large numbers, and at very low cost (around £25 incl. VAT, for a 60 day advert). More recently though,we’ve been trying the excellent Resumator, which not only offers a useful online interface, but also has a brilliant integration device for your own company site (And it’s free to advertise a single job). A single line of javascript dynamically shows all open vacancies on your company’s web page. This is genius and instantly makes a small company’s recruitment offering look about 10 times more professional - you can even define custom form fields which the candidate must fill in, as well as the usual upload CV options.

So, we decided to run our recent recruitment using both Resumator and gumtree, then we found that gumtree now have an online organisation product for job applications. They’re calling it “Response Manager” but it is actually App Vault under the hood. It costs £15 extra, on top of the £25. I wasn’t familiar with this product and I have to say it has not been a good experience whatsoever. Not only is the online interface typically extremely slow to respond, it also seems riddled with bugs.

I realised only after the first CV came through via email, that applicants were being asked a long and irrelevant set of questions, which I had been given no chance to view or edit before the vacancy went live (How about a confirmation email and login details gumtree?!). So I found myself frantically trying to prune the questions and ask some more sensible ones instead - except that AppVault (AKA Response Manager) wouldn’t reliably delete anything, and often my edits went into cyberspace (where no one can hear you scream - not even a recruitment consultant). 30 frustrating minutes later, I’d just about honed the questions into some sort of shape - but not before six candidates had applied.

A few days later, as I was flicking through CVs and reorganising them into folders, I frequently got thrown out to a default error page and told that my request had been denied as my internet speed was too slow! Not bad considering I’m on a corporate 8Mb connection. Also, the fact that the candidate’s uploaded documents have to be downloaded and can’t be viewed onscreen, is a real pain. What makes matters worse is that they are all delivered as a uniformly named download file “binaryupload.doc/docx/pdf”, meaning it’s more fiddly to view several documents in sucession as you have to keep renaming or closing documents. Whoever thought up this usabilty challenged nightmare really should take a look at Resumator’s beautiful online PDF/Word reader, Scribd, which looks like it might be from the same stable.

Still, the worst was yet to come - as we’d had getting on for 100 applications, we decided to pull the advert from gumtree. With no warning, this has now removed our access to the candidate’s application form responses and CVs! So all the hard work I did to sort them into folders (in “Response Manager”) has been lost. A panic email to the supplied support email has produced no reply. An official complaint to Gumtree, and a dispute opened with Paypal are also apparently not important enough for Gumtree to process - yet.

So, my advice to any budding companies and recruiters - stay clear of Gumtree’s Response Manager. It’s hopeless (or will be until they improve it). Head for the Resumator instead - and I must tip my hat to Dan at Pitchup for recommending it to me.

We’re on the look out for a wonderful IT support analyst to join the friendly team at Loopo.

We require a bright, breezy individual to manage our support operations and handle 1st/2nd line support for our online recruitment/application portals and other web applications. You will be exceptionally IT literate, with excellent communication skills and an ability to ruffle furrowed brows and generally keep a large number of balls in the air.

You will preferably have some experience in an IT support environment. Experience and knowledge of web hosting environments and web development is desirable.Read more about it here and send us your CV if you think you’d like to part of Loopo’s future.

Loopo moved offices on Monday. We can now be found here.

We’re very pleased to be housed in the same building as our client Mash Marketing. Mash have done an awesome job of fitting out their offices, it is an inspiring creative space to work in, and we like the buzz of a busy marketing company upstairs as well.

Pictures coming soon!

Last Sunday, 7th June, VA Serv, the company that provides some of our servers, had their VPS systems hacked to pieces. Reportedly, this affected as many as 150,000 websites. We’re lucky that our backup and redundancy systems enabled us to recover our affected sites within a short space of time. In fact most of our clients didn’t even realise anything was wrong - just the way we like it.

However, it did give me pause for thought, on a few counts.

It turns out that VA Serv had been using the same VPS (Virtual Private Server) technology to host their billing and sales systems as they were leasing to their clients. That’s fine as far as it goes, but of course when a vulnerability was found in the VPS management software, VA’s “back office” systems also became vulnerable. This was clearly a case where “eating your own dog food” was the wrong thing to do.

It also raises wider concerns about web based admin systems, and cloud computing in general - these are powerful and compelling concepts which help bring down the cost and effort required to build and maintain complex IT systems - but at what cost?

Ultimately, this is a chilling reminder that any data stored on the internet is only safe if you trust the people hosting it for you. And it’s very difficult to decide what to base that trust on - incidents like the attack on VA Serv happen fairly rarely these days.

Finally, some further reading. And perhaps most shocking of all (if you believe it’s genuine) - this was posted on webhostingtalk (and then quickly taken down). It purports to be from one of the hackers.

Do mac laptops still have longer battery life than PC equivalents (now Intel versions of both are available)? Does OS X use less power than the various versions of Windows, or does it depend on what software is running? I find running Parallels on my apple laptop, to use Windows XP, drains the battery pretty quickly - probably due to running 2 operating systems on one machine.

With a quick search, i found a comparison of various Unix operating systems, and Windows XP - on the same hardware - here. It’s not that thorough an article - but interestingly Windows uses less power. I wouldn’t be surprised if OSX (Leopard) with all it’s fancy flying windows uses more than XP (SP2), but i’ve not really used Vista. XP can appear to work more quickly if you switch off all the visual effects, and probably uses less power without them. Some testing required, though not much time for that at the moment.

I’m sure someone out there will be comparing this soon, and maybe we’ll all be optimising our code to reduce power consumption in the future

We’re currently looking for 2 experienced freelancers, a .NET/MSSQL Server specialist and a PHP/MySQL specialist. For more details, see This page.

Long term clients of ours Manners Mcdade commissioned a reworking of their old website in a more modern content management system.

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I had an unusual experience in the summer while visiting the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. My wife had some problems walking long distances, and we both wanted to look round the aquarium, so we asked the reception on the off chance if they had a wheelchair we could borrow. They did, and next thing i knew, i was pushing my wife round to see lots of different fishes.

The experience made sense of some of the user accessibility issues we deal with day to day on the web and how important it is to get it right. If a visitor to a website can’t easily get to the content with or without a virtual wheelchair (aka screen reader), we’re not doing our jobs properly. If the buttons and links can’t be reached from the ‘wheelchair’, the visitor might miss important parts of the website.

We also visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan during the summer, and again borrowed a wheelchair to help with the amount of walking. Unlike the aquarium, there were parts of the garden we couldn’t access with the wheelchair. I suppose the Victorian designers had other things on their minds.

We’ve not afraid of embracing new technologies at Loopo, and right now this seems to have reached fever pitch. The time was ripe to try some Python development, and we’re now running both Plone and Django projects back to back.
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Loopo is pleased to announce we’ll be working with EMI Classics to improve and extend their website. We’ll be making a number of changes to the existing website, and also doing some back office integration to allow streamlining of the release process.