Is your web identity a help or a hindrance to your employability?
ComputerWorld has an article about how recruiters use web anonymity to find more information out about job applicants.
In a 2006 survey by executive search firm ExecuNet in Norwalk, Conn., 77 of 100 recruiters said they use search engines to check out job candidates. In a CareerBuilder.com survey of 1,150 hiring managers last year, one in four said they use Internet search engines to research potential employees. One in 10 said they also use social networking sites to screen candidates. In fact, according to Search Engine Watch, there are 25 million to 50 million proper-name searches performed each day.
They go on to list some tips like starting a blog, joining open source communities, building a web page, creating web profiles. Andy pads it out with some more helpful suggestions like getting a domain name, tips for getting the number one spot for your name and controlling what appears in search results for your name.
I’ve written about privacy, internet usage and real name searches a few times with my Facebook tips, guide to pseudonyms/identity hiding and tips on hiding your LinkedIn profile from searches outside of your LinkedIn network. When I started this blog a year ago it was with the idea that it could help with the job hunt, but then the slew of articles I read about people losing their jobs because of blogging convinced me otherwise.
Hack – Display Your Technorati Rank in a Sidebar RSS Widget (Dapper + Yahoo Pipes)
WordPress.com bloggers can’t use nifty WordPress plugins or Javascript to doing something as simple as displaying their Technorati rank in their sidebar. Dapper.net and Yahoo Pipes both give the users the ability to create their own mashups of existing web services. Neither of them quite get it right — Dapper doesn’t give you enough output / programming options and Yahoo Pipes doesn’t give you an interface for scraping any page the way Dapper does. Which is my long-winded way of saying I got Dapper to create RSS feeds that contain nothing but your Technorati rank.
Of course, the interface to the Dapper RSS feed is less than stellar, which is where Yahoo Pipes comes in. Yahoo Pipes also lets me create several flavours depending on what people want.
See the full list of free software I have created.
You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.
Best of Feeds – 27 links – blogging, google, tips, development, alist, howto
Best of Feeds is a weekly series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted on Twitter as they happen and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
This time I have 27 links from: 37signals, angryaussie, guykawasaki, webanalyticsdemystified, codinghorror, computer, consumerist, deepjiveinterests, dilbertblog, hyperorg, lifehacker, lundone, makeuseof, mattcutts, neomeme, paulstamatiou, publishing2, randsinrepose, readwriteweb, scottberkun, usrbingeek, violentacres, webomatica, webworkerdaily, winextra
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My Top Must Have Firefox Extensions
I’m always amazed that people use Internet Explorer over Firefox. With the available extensions Firefox becomes the nerve center of your Internet activity. Lifehacker quite often has good suggestions for FF Extensions to try out.
These are what I use. All links go to more information about the extension.
General
- Google Toolbar for Firefox
- Also avilable for IE
- Adblock Plus – people still surf the net with ads?!
- PDF Download – I hate embedded Adobe Reader (which is why I use FoxIt)
Bookmarking / Sharing Sites
- del.icio.us – I use religiously, even automatically generating blog posts off of it and sharing my del.icio.us links with people on Twitter
- stumbleupon – not a productivity tool :)
Web Development
- Greasemonkey – I’ve written several greasemonkey scripts to make blogging with WordPress easier
- DOM Inspector – needed for coding with Greasemonkey
- Web Developer – CSS development, mainly because I haven’t figured out Firebug yet. The easiest way to create a skin for a theme without having to spend a lot of time learning the underlying structure – click on an element and find out how to access it.
Some I plan to try out: Firebug, Stylish, IETab, CustomizeGoogle
What do you use/recommend?
Global Warming 2007
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I was surprised as anyone that She’s still running Windows 2000 Server Edition.
Broadcasting RSS Feeds with Twitterbot in Less Than 5 Minutes
Everyone is all atwitter about the Twitter web service. It’s a web-based broadcast instant messaging application where you can send updates by email or by SMS mobile. It has a limitation of 140 characters and is a lot like how people have always used their instant messenger away status (or their Facebook status). Like all public web communication people will lose their jobs and destroy relationships over Twitter before they realize that it’s all public, it’s all archived, and it’s all searchable (but you can restrict messages to only go to friends).
I’m not going to use Twitter to start posting all of the trivialities of my life, but I *am* interested in using it to broadcast my blog posts, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and the occasional aside (you can friend me here). Here is how you can do something similar using a program called Twitterbot by R. Tyler Ballance at the Unethical Blogger.
By the end of this guide you’ll have a program up and running that will download RSS feeds and broadcast them over your Twitter account.
Off-topic News: Massive Pet Food Recall
This has nothing to do with tech but everything to do with the fact I use my pet as my mascot.
93 brands: The pet-food manufacturer Menu Foods was not a household name until it announced a massive recall Friday, but many of the brand names it was sold under would be familiar to any pet owner. At first unable to tell the extent of the possible problems, officials with Menu Foods later posted on its website a list of scores of affected brands of dog and cat food. The company has recalled specific products from 51 brands of dog food and 42 brands of cat food.
It’s for dog and cat food it manufactured between December 3, 2006 and March 6, 2007 — “cuts and gravy” style pet food in cans and pouches. Complete list of cat products listed here and complete list of dog food products listed here. The pet food can lead to kidney failure which has symptoms of your pet becoming lethargic, stops eating and starts drinking lots of water.
Cat food brands affected (42): Americas Choice, Preferred Pets, Authority, Best Choice, Companion, Compliments, Demoulas Market Basket, Eukanuba, Fine Feline Cat, Food Lion, Foodtown, Giant Companion, Hannaford, Hill Country Fare, Hy-Vee, Iams, Laura Lynn, Li’l Red, Loving Meals, Meijer’s Main Choice, Nutriplan, Nutro Max Gourmet Classics, Nutro Natural Choice, Paws, Pet Pride, Presidents Choice, Price Chopper, Priority US, Save-A-Lot, Schnucks, Science Diet Feline Savory Cuts Cans, Sophistacat, Special Kitty Canada, Special Kitty US, Springfield Prize, Sprout, Stop & Shop Companion, Tops Companion, Wegmans, Weis Total Pet, Western Family US, White Rose, Winn Dixie.
Dog food brands affected (52): Americas Choice, Preferred Pets, Authority, Award, Best Choice, Big Bet, Big Red, Bloom, Wegmans Bruiser, Cadillac, Companion, Demoulas Market Basket, Eukanuba, Food Lion, Giant Companion, Great Choice, Hannaford, Hill Country Fare, Hy-Vee, Iams, Laura Lynn, Loving Meals, Meijers Main Choice, Mighty Dog Pouch, Mixables, Nutriplan, Nutro Max, Nutro Natural Choice, Nutro Ultra, Nutro, Ol’Roy Canada, Ol’Roy US, Paws, Pet Essentials, Pet Pride – Good n Meaty, Presidents Choice, Price Chopper, Priority Canada, Priority US, Publix, Roche Brothers, Save-A-Lot, Schnucks, Shep Dog, Springsfield Prize, Sprout, Stater Brothers, Stop & Shop Companion, Tops Companion, Weis Total Pet, Western Family US, White Rose, Winn Dixie, Your Pet
It’s scary how many different pet food brands use the same source for base ingredients.
Windows XP Logon Screen with No User Accounts?
The worst purchase I ever made was my Compaq Presario laptop. It has been a near endless cause of headaches. I was playing around with some settings and when I rebooted my computer I noticed that it prompted me with the Windows login screen… except there were no user accounts?!
Automatic Documentation of Python Code using Doxygen
All programming is maintenance programming, meaning that the most value comes from programming code that can be picked up and maintained by someone else. I strongly believe that code and documentation should always go hand in hand. When someone else is trying to modify your code they have no idea they need to read a PDF API document to find out more information about what a function is supposed to do. Whenever documentation exists in a seperate file it always seems to drift away from the code.
A while back I compared several open source tools for automatically generating documentation based on code comments. Doxygen is easily one of the best programs. It was written for C/C++ but there are hacks/filters for getting it working with other languages like Python, Perl and Verilog.
Python comes with a tool for generating documentation called Pydoc, but I don’t like tools that use introspection because they usually choke on weird file import rules. I was elated to find out that they’ve included Python support in Doxygen without having to translating Python to C++. This is a guide for automatically generating documentation off of Python source code using Doxygen.
Best of Feeds – 21 links – blogging, development, twitter, blog, web2.0, socialsoftware
Best of Feeds is a regular series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted as asides daily at 7pm EST and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
This time I have 21 links from: albinoblacksheep, andybeard.eu, angryaussie, avc.blogs, businessblogwire, dailyblogtips, deepjiveinterests, drivl, gilesbowkett, gracefulflavor, haacked, headrush, joshua.schachter, my.opera, nik.com.au, plentyoffish, randsinrepose, redchaos, scobleizer, thingsmyboyfriendsays, webomatica
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SOAP and The Importance of Hallway Usability Testing
Disambiguation: I’m talking about Business Blogwire’s “Scratch One Another Program” not “Simple Object Access Program”
Joel Spolsky writes that:
A hallway usability test is where you grab the next person that passes by in the hallway and force them to try to use the code you just wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code.
A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.
He writes even more on the subject in his free book on UI design. I’m one of those people who always comes up with complicated solutions and hacks. I find detaching myself from something I’m familiar with and looking at it with the mindset of a new user one of the hardest tasks. That’s why I love the idea behind sites like Hallway Testing and projects like SOAP.
(note: SOAP is looking for more bloggers to participate)
When it comes to website design the most important opinion is that of someone with a fresh view. And that’s why I was so happy at the quality response I got from Yvonne at Grow Your Writing Business. Now I need to get off my butt and SOAP Make It Great (as well as make the improvements from Yvonne’s suggestions).
I highly recommend participating in SOAP if you are interested in improving your web site design.
If you’re interested in reading the advice Yvonne gave me then click the link to read more.
I display my FeedBurner subscribers count because I don’t have a choice…
Maki tagged me with his Feed Count meme exploring the reasons why bloggers display their FeedBurner feed count statistics (this is my last post in a row talking about RSS, I promise).
Why FeedBurner?
Maki left out this question, but I think it’s a valid one. I choose to use FeedBurner for my RSS feeds because of the following things it gives me (for free):
The Secret Behind Why Blog Readers Unsubscribe
RSS is a way of subscribing to news/blog feeds that keeps track of new updates and what you have already read. It’s like having your very own little paperboy trapped inside the computer scouring the Internet for the things you like to read (except not nearly as creepy and possibly illegal). RSS is the best way to keep track of several sites with the minimal amount of hassle. It’s also one of the few reliable ways to find out how many people are regularly read your blog.
Darren at ProBlogger leveraged his 20,000 RSS readers and polled them to find out why people unsubscribe from blog RSS feeds. They came up with a list of 34 reasons. The top three reasons people unsubscribe from RSS feeds is because there are too many posts, there are too few posts or because the blog uses partial feeds. Partial feeds are when the RSS feed only shows a snippet of post and you have to click through to the blog to read the entire thing.
That’s an interesting contradiction! Obviously, the solution is to have a consistent posting rhythm, but why is there such a schism between people unsubscribing because of too few or too many posts?
The answer is in which RSS application they use.
Which RSS reader people use greatly affects how they interact with and view RSS feeds. Different RSS readers will have different features and limitations that will change the user’s behaviour. I’ve tried out Firefox Sage, Netvibes, Google Personal Homepage, Bloglines and Google Reader (in that order) and these are the conclusions I’ve drawn.
Request for Comments: Which RSS Reader and Why?
I have a post later today about different RSS readers, but before I get to it I want to find out what my readers are using. If you’re particularly passionate about your RSS reader software I’d love to hear why you feel that way. If you’re particularly passionate against RSS I’d love to hear that also.
Please leave a comment or a trackback.
Feed Reader Stats According to WordPress.com
Google Feedfetcher: 47.5%
Bloglines: 13.7%
NewsGatorOnline: 5.5%
Netvibes: 4.4%
FeedDemon: 0.8%
NetNewsWire: 0.8%
Feed Reader Stats According to FeedBurner
Google Feedfetcher: 39%
Bloglines: 9%
Firefox Live Bookmarks: 8%
Netvibes: 6%
NewsGatorOnline: 4%
My favorite entries from Contest #1
Last month I held my first contest / group writing project. It was limited to wordpress.com hosted bloggers and 23 people participated. These are my favorite posts of the bunch. It being my first contest, the topics were on the schizophrenic side without a common thread: why do you blog, what do you like/hate about Valentine’s Day or review something tech. That’s my fault, not theirs.
I’m running a second contest / group writing project where you could win an Amazon gift certificate or WordPress.com upgrade credits.
These are my seven favorites from the contest entries. Listed in order of submission, with a preview snippet.
Looking for Guest Bloggers and Contest Deadline Extended
Work is very busy at the moment (no, the slow down in posts has not been entirely from TGC) and there will be a week or two during the month of April when I will be completely “away-from-keyboard” and not have access to the net.
It kind of sucks because I may miss my one year anniversary of blogging!
Guest Bloggers
So I’m looking for some guest bloggers. I’ve only had one guest-blogged post so far and it did around 10,000 hits. This can be a great opportunity to reach a wider audience, and to help me out. Read more about why you should guestblog and how to be a good guestblogger at problogger.net.
Tag Cloud Generator – New Version
A new version of Tag Cloud Generator is available (07/03/11)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug with some CSS styles not being created unless you had a lot of categories.
New Features
- Included lots of examples of how to tweak the different options.
- Can check for updates/bug announcements from within the program.
- Add colours to your tag cloud (IE: a heat map)
- Every option is configurable.
- Choose different colours, different sizes or both for the tag cloud.
- Control the size of the smallest and largest fonts.
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- Useful for people who do not have the CSS upgrade.
- Control the number of different CSS styles that are created.
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- You may want more or less.
- Display the settings used in tagcloud.html and tagcloud_css.html.
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- Good for creating examples and debugging problems.
- Tested with various self-hosted WordPress installs — it works.
Still ToDo
- Mac/Unix versions
Best of Feeds – 30 links – software, google, startup, humor, programming, tips
Best of Feeds is a regular series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted as asides daily at 7pm EST and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
This time I have 30 links from: alistair.cockburn.us, baron.vc, believeitsbetter, guykawasaki, outer-court, businesslogs, cs.caltech.edu, dailyblogtips, dfinitive, didntyouhear, doshdosh, engtech, ericsink, foolswisdom, gilesbowkett, itworld, louisgray, mattcutts, modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk, netbusinessblog, psydk, radar.oreilly, ravensview.ca, secretasianman, seoblackhat, seomoz, techsoapbox, websiteoptimization, workrave
Design Tips: Website Speed Optimization for Dummies
… and by dummies, I mean me.
Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has been doing a series on website speed optimization hacks after one of his posts when viral (to a ridiculous level) last week. Daniel at DailyBloggingTips is starting up a “speed up your site” series today with even more tips. Needless to say I’m feeling the peer pressure to fix some of my site speed problems.
If a website takes longer than 1-2 seconds to load then most people give up on it, so doing what you can to make your site faster (and your readers happier) is in your best interest.
How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job over it
I’ve followed my friends as they jump around from social network to social network, creating profiles on Friendster, Hi-5, Orkut, MySpace and now Facebook, even though I never use the sites.
Facebook is great networking tool that lets you keep in contact with former friends from high school, university and various jobs. It easily connects people together with tools like registering that you are the owner of a specific cell phone number, keeping track of every email address you’ve ever had, and logging into your email account to find out who you know.
As you can guess from my previous series on online pseudo-anonymity, something that collects as much personal information as Facebook scares the bejebus out of me. From the address book import I can clearly see that everyone I’ve ever even remotely known is already on Facebook, and the default settings mean they’re all sharing all kinds of personal information they may not be aware of.
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