Here at TechCrunch HQ, we’re looking to add a couple fellow Rubyists to help us build out CrunchBase, our pride and joy. Being a TechCrunch developer is a pretty sweet gig: we work on a technically interesting, growing structured wiki, attend a lot of startup events (including our own), and get to meet and partner with cool companies within the startup ecosystem. We also work with great tools (Ruby, Rails, RSpec, Git, etc).

So check out our official job description below and apply by emailing Gené if you’re interested in joining our small team.

Want to work for TechCrunch?

Founded on June 11, 2005, TechCrunch, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. Today TechCrunch is the most popular technology weblog on the Internet and is ranked #2 on the Technorati 100.

TechCrunch is building a small but intense team of web developers to work on CrunchBase, our online database of startup, investor and entrepreneur information. CrunchBase attempts to structure the world of tech companies; it aggregates funding, acquisitions, products, people, investors, and offices via mashups and user-submitted data. We’re all about opening up our data as much as possible; we recently launched an API that’s taking off and gives developers easy integration and complete access to CrunchBase. Since its inception, CrunchBase has grown into one of the largest structured wiki deployments on the net (and unofficially one of the top 50 trafficked Rails sites).

What’s it like working for TechCrunch?

TechCrunch is very much a startup. The culture is fast paced and dynamic with a significant amount of exposure to other startups in the technology industry. We throw big events including movie screenings, our annual August Capital party, and TechCrunch50.

As for development, we work with Ruby and we work with Rails. We use TextMate, rSpec, Capistrano, Git, GitHub, Lighthouse and we practice ‘agile web development’. We eat DRY code for breakfast, write specs in the afternoon, and deploy new stuff at night.

View the full job listing on CrunchBoard.

We did a fun interview for the famous FiveRuns‘ TakeFive series. Check it out here.

Wikinvest, a wiki company that does a lot of cool things with investments, just released an embeddable, interactive stock chart widget today. We’ve been looking for a widget like this for a while (kind of like compete/quancast graphs but for stocks), so when we saw it we naturally had to add it for all of our public companies as quickly as possible. See Amazon’s or Google’s page to check it out. When Wikinvest itself goes public, its own widget will show up on its CrunchBase page — and that will be truly awesome.

Today we’re exposing the complete revision history of all the edits made on CrunchBase, along with some cool ways of visualizing this historical data.

Revisions

Each CrunchBase entity page now has revisions — subpages where you can browse the edit history of a particular entity (say, Facebook’s edit history).  From the revisions page you can view revision pages which show what an entity page looked like at a historical point in time. For example, you can see what Facebook page looked like on March 19th, 2008 when it had its fifth edit. You can also step through the revision pages like a book, seeing how the page evolved over time.

Comparing Revisions

Something we’re particularly excited about are diff pages, which offer visual comparisons of two revisions of an entity. In obligatory red and green colors, diff pages highlight the sections that were present in the old version (red) and the ones that have been changed in the new (green).

You can find the diff pages from the revisions page by clicking on the date and time of an edit. Like revision pages, you can step through the diff pages to gain an historical appreciation of user edits. Also, comparison between any two arbitrary revisions in time is a snap (here’s the Facebook’s diff of revisions 5 and 74).

RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds! With an edit history, we figured we should generate a feed for entities so that users can receive notice when a page gets edited. If you go to an entity’s revisions page, you’ll see a Subscribe via RSS link in the top right-hand corner (see image, left). Currently, the feed items include the time, user, and a link to the diff page (”see what’s changed”), but we hope to make them more useful in the future. If you want to keep close tabs on your company’s (or your own) page, this is definitely the easiest way to do so.

Since launching the CrunchBase API less than two weeks ago we’ve seen a great response from developers, who have already developed a number of impressive plugins and applications. The CrunchBase API offers access to information from thousands of tech companies, VCs and startup entrepreneurs. It’s free to use, there are no accounts to sign up for and no request throttling. The API returns clean, pretty-printed JSON, and only basic attribution is required.

To learn more, read the rest of the post and follow the discussion at TechCrunch.

We’ve just rolled out three new features for the CrunchBase API, all implemented based on feedback from our early users.

The first is the new “list” action that returns the name and permalink for all entities in CrunchBase of a certain type. For example:

http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/companies.js

The second new feature is a “search” action. To search across CrunchBase for entities matching a given keyword or keywords, use:

http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/search.js?query=techcrunch

The third feature is JavaScript callbacks, which are enabled for both the exisiting “show” API action and the new “search” action. For example:

http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/search.js?query=techcrunch&callback=callme

This request returns JavaScript that will call the function callme with the API data as a single argument.

Be sure to check out the Google Group for complete documentation and mailing list information.

We’ve recently been working on the CrunchBase API. To encourage API use, we want to make it as easy as possible for users to access our data. An important part of this is strategy is providing easy-to-read JSON output, which we accomplish with our now open source Ruby JSON pretty-printer library.

JSON is a lightweight and web-friendly data exchange format that we generally prefer to XML and YAML. However, we are not happy with the difficulty of reading the default ActiveSupport to_json output. For example, this is some typical output (some data attributes have been omited to save space):

{"permalink":"techcrunch","products":[{"permalink":"techcrunch","name":
"TechCrunch"},{"permalink":"crunchgear","name":"CrunchGear"},{"permalink":
"crunchbase","name":"CrunchBase"}],"relationships":[{"is_past":false,"title":
"Founder and Co-Editor","person":{"permalink":"michael-arrington","first_name":
"Michael","last_name":"Arrington"}},{"is_past":false,"title":"CEO","person":
{"permalink":"heather-harde","first_name":"Heather","last_name":"Harde"}}],
"homepage_url":\\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com", "name":"TechCrunch"}

That looks pretty bad to us, and we think it will deter potential API users. We want a user to be able to come to our CrunchBase API help page, click on one of the example API urls, and see in their browsers a nicely-formated and easily-readable JSON response. Something like this:

{"name": "TechCrunch",
 "permalink": "techcrunch",
 "homepage_url": "http://www.techcrunch.com",
 "products":
  [{"name": "TechCrunch",
    "permalink": "techcrunch"},
   {"name": "CrunchGear",
    "permalink": "crunchgear"},
   {"name": "CrunchBase",
    "permalink": "crunchbase"}],
 "relationships":
  [{"is_past": false,
    "title": "Founder and Co-Editor",
    "person":
     {"first_name": "Michael",
      "last_name": "Arrington",
      "permalink": "michael-arrington"}},
   {"is_past": false,
    "title": "CEO",
    "person":
     {"first_name": "Heather",
      "last_name": "Harde",
      "permalink": "heather-harde"}}]}

Not finding any existing Ruby JSON pretty-printers on Google or GitHub, we wrote our own. The new JsonPrinter exposes a single class method render, which return a JSON representation of any given object consisting of arrays, hashes, symbols, strings, numbers, and false, true, and nil values.

The printer uses a simple but effective rendering algorithm. In addition to managing whitespace, the printer recognizes ordered hashes, which is nice when you’d prefer certain attributes like “name” and “permalink” to appear at the top of the output. Finally, our benchmarks indicate that the printer is faster than the JSON gem’s pure Ruby implementation.

You can see some live examples at these urls:

api.crunchbase.com/v/1/company/facebook.js
api.crunchbase.com/v/1/person/brad-fitzpatrick.js

Check out our JsonPrinter project page on GitHub and see our CrunchBase API announcement post.

Today we’re excited to announce a free, open, and easily-accessible API for all data included in CrunchBase, our tech company database. It is available immediately to all developers.

Since we relaunched the property five months ago, we’ve focused on accumulating and structuring the world’s most useful data about technology. And we’ve worked to make this data available in a variety of ways. For example, we’ve aggregated funding rounds and acquisitions, and we’ve built out maps and advanced search. This next step - opening up our data completely so that anyone can use it however they want - is not only logical but central to our mission as well.

To learn more, read the rest of the post and follow the discussion at TechCrunch.

Welcome to the new CrunchBase blog! We’ll be writing here about new features on CrunchBase, interesting startup related news that on the site, and the Rails code that powers the back end.