Today we updated the JobServe Labs website and our Job Search Web Service with a few tweaks to improve the experience for you all.

The major content improvement we’ve made is to move our social bookmarking and online-feed reading links to using the combined Add This buttons in order to get as much coverage as possible across all the social bookmarking websites that we all like to use.

The other tweaks concern the amount of physical bytes that our servers generate to actually present the website in front of you.  We’ve extended the caching that your browser is allowed to do, and all of our dynamic content is now sent down the wire to you in either gzip or deflate compression if your browser supports it.

This last enhancement also covers the responses sent by the web services that drive our Windows Vista Gadget and our OpenSearch Provider, yielding about a 66% reduction in size for the Xml or Json payload.  These features were already excellent for users that have limited bandwidth, but now you should find they are even faster!

Content coming up

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be writing about the various bits and pieces that contribute to the whole JobServe Labs content offering, including:

• How we wrote our OpenSearch suggestions service in C# using WCF in .Net 3.5
• The techniques we’ve used to implement HTTP 304 Not Modified (10.3.5 of RFC 2616) responses from our dynamic pages and WCF services
• How to write a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget – following in the footsteps of our very own Job Search gadget
• How we’ve used Windows Live Writer as our content editing solution for nearly all of the content you see on this website – using a C# WCF Service as the ‘blog service’ endpoint for Live Writer.

We won’t be stingy with these articles, there will be code samples and walkthroughs on how to do some of this stuff yourself.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our even faster website and Job Search service!

Technology Team

JobServe