But for those who do run into this request, Interfolio can now handle it for you.

Wikhost.org has the wonderful advantage of being free and easy to use, but Chris and I realized that we could do something that no wiki on wikhost could do: we could provide RSS feeds that feed information about each job directly to you. (You can access our RSS feed at http://phylo.info/jobs/rss.) As with thought more about creating a wiki here on Phylo, we realized that our wiki could have other advantages, like filtering capabilities and connections with our database of institutional information.

If you’ve never used RSS, you’re missing out. RSS stands for “really simple syndication,” and it’s a wonderful invention that web sites use to syndicate information to end users and even other web sites. Subscribing to an RSS feed is a bit like subscribing to a web site’s updates via email, except that it doesn’t clutter your inbox and you don’t have to give out your email address. Personally, I find email updates extremely annoying. I usually banish them, unread, to my trash folder. But I find RSS really useful. For instance, I use a free RSS reader called Vienna. I subscribe to specific sections of various newspapers, about half a dozen philosophy-related blogs, about two dozen philosophy journals (which send updates of news issues or papers), a handful of tech-related blogs, and various feeds on the Phylo site itself. There’s no way I would keep track of all of these things on my own, but my RSS reader helps me pretend that I can keep track of them.

To get started using RSS, I’d suggest downloading Vienna or checking out Google Reader. Then go to your favorite newspaper’s RSS page (e.g., the feed list for the New York Times) and subscribe to whatever sections interest you. Then go to some of your favorite philosopher blogs or philosophy journals and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

And of course, if you’re on the job market, subscribe to the philosophy job wiki feed at http://phylo.info/jobs/rss. You’ll get a new item in your feed every time a new job listing is added to the wiki and every time someone updates the status of the wiki (e.g., when someone reports that the school that you’re dying to work for has scheduled APA interviews).

In other words, the job wiki can now crush your hopes and dreams from afar. I told you RSS was wonderful.

(One note for people already subscribed to the RSS feed: We tweaked the feed earlier today because some RSS readers weren’t displaying things correctly. This may result in your reader telling you that everything is new. I’m very sorry to tell you that there are not 143 new job listings today. The feed should behave normally from this point on.)

At its core, Phylo is a database of professional information about academic philosophers, from which we can infer professional connections and relationships among those philosophers. Drupal gives us the ability to keep track of that information in a relational database, and it lets users view and manipulate that data in various ways. We’re using a lot of off-the-shelf modules that have been contributed by Drupal’s users, but we’ve also added a lot of modifications of our own, including a custom interface written in jQuery.

The SIMILE Project, started at MIT, provides a suite of software that lets you do all kinds of great things with data on the “client side” (i.e., on the end user’s computer). For instance, Timeline lets us plot a person’s academic career on a timeline or display a timeline of the faculty and students in a given department. Exhibit enables users to filter and sort the data in all kinds of ways.

Both Drupal and SIMILE have fairly steep learning curves, and it’s often frustrating to get them to play nicely together, but we think the products that you can create with the two of them are worth the effort. Besides, they’re both open source, and we’re big fans of the open source software movement.