Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress

Do you stand out?

Here’s a news flash – the economy is a little rough these days.  With the unemployment rate creeping up, it’s a time when you need to be clear about what you can bring to a prospective employer or client and, above all, to stand out from the competition.  Fortunately, it’s cheaper and easier than ever to make yourself “present with authority.”

One of my new year’s resolutions was to get my online identity sorted out, which means making the most of the available tools and delivering a consistent message. After taking inventory of the various professional sites to which I belong (e.g. LinkedIn, VisualCV), I decided that I needed an aggregator to take charge and deliver my message, my way, in my style. I had registered my own name as a domain many years ago but not done anything with it, and so I decided to use WordPress to tell my professional story.

What Are the Benefits?

If you think about your career as a product that you’re selling, wouldn’t it make perfect sense to have a web site? Of course it does, and you want your personal brand to have the same benefits:

• More and more, clients and employers are performing online searches to learn more about the people with which they are considering to engage. Having a search engine friendly web site makes it more likely they will find you.
• Indexing your experience through the use of keywords makes it easy for people to zero in on the skills and/or expertise in which they’re interested (more about that later).
• Multimedia capabilities (i.e. images, video, presentations, links) make it easier for you to tell your story in a vivid and interesting way.
• You can use specialized links to direct people to specific content areas of your profile.
• While this practice may soon be common place, for the moment at least it will help you to stand out from the crowd.

Laying the Groundwork

The first decision is your domain name. One option is to use Blogger or WordPress.org (e.g. jondipietro.wordpress.org), which is free. However, for the few dollars a year it costs you are far better off registering your own domain name; preferably your first and last names if available. This article will discuss building your online resume using WordPress on your own hosted site.
Once the basic WordPress installation is in place, the first thing you’ll want to do is to find a clean, professional theme and install it. There are a number of plugins that I install on every WordPress site right out of the gate:

• Add to Any Sharing and Subscribing buttons: Makes it easy for visitors to share, save, bookmark, and/or subscribe to your site.
• All in One SEO Pack : Provides a bunch of handy tools to make your site more search engine friendly.
• Contact Form 7 : Create customized forms for visitors to send you messages.
• Exclude Pages from Navigation : Allows you to easily build landing pages.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith : Synchs your blog with FeedBurner.
• Google Analyticator : Installs the Google Analytics script on your site so you can track traffic.
• Google XML Sitemaps : Creates the XML site map files that makes it easier for Google to discover pages on your site.
• Simple Tags : Makes it really easy to manage the tags that you’ll use to mark your areas of expertise.
• SlideShare : Allows you to embed SlideShare presentations.
• Social Links : Display buttons with links to your social networking sites in the sidebar.
• WordPress Database Backup : Ounce of prevention, and all that…
• WP-Mail-SMTP : Reconfigures the wp_mail() function to use SMTP instead of mail().

Turn the Page

Now it’s time to set up the pages.  I decided on the following site map:

• Home
• About Me
  • Work History
  • Skills
  • Volunteerism
• Experience
• Companies
• Social Networks
• Contact Me

The tricky thing about this is that, by default, WordPress publishes blog articles to the front page of the site.  In order to implement my strategy, it’s important to change that.  You can do this on the Reading Settings page by selecting “Home” for your front page and “Experience” as the posts page.

Change the default settings for the front and posts pages.

Next, you’ll need to populate the Home, About Me, Work Experience, and Skills pages.  The Home page functions as a sort of generic cover letter, while the other pages represent the customary sections of a resume.  However, you have the freedom to be a little more creative and verbose in this environment than on a paper resume.
What you don’t see in the site map (or in the menu) is my social networking landing page.  Another benefit of having your own web site is the ability to create landing pages from other sites that allow you to customize messages and, again, tell your story.  For example, Twitter provides very little space to customize your profile but they do allow you to enter a web site URL that you can point to a customized landing page.  This is where the “Exclude Pages from Navigation Menu” plugin comes in handy.

Rubber Meets Road

Skills, experiences, clients, etc... are displayed in the tag cloud widget.

The power of this approach now takes shape as you create blog posts to describe specific projects, publications, and experiences.  The key is carefully selected categories and liberal use of tags for the posts.  This will allow employers and/or clients to quickly zero in on the topics in which they are interested.  And since you’re making it easy to find the information they’re looking for, you can feel free to include lots of details, making them as interactive as possible.  You’ll want to include the Simple Tags tag could widget in the sidebar.
The categories are also important and you can use them to organize your pages and posts at a higher level than the tags.  How and where the categories are displayed is somewhat dependent upon your theme.  Some themes display them as menu itmes while others are displayed in the sidebar and is a matter of your personal preference.

Shout It Out Loud

Once your online resume is good to go, you can send out customized links to direct people straight to a particular area of interest.  For example, if I’m looking to secure a consulting contract for VB.NET development, I could send the following in an email:

“Please see the VB.NET projects listed on my online resume.”

The “VB.NET” link is http://www.jondipietro.com/tag/vbnet, which will automatically display a list of all pages or posts that were tagged with the VB.NET keyword.  You can begin to see how easy it is to send customized links to employers and clients that zoom right in to the areas on which you want them focused.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, I didn’t initially set out to create an online resume but once I started putting the idea together it became clear how compelling and useful this approach can be.  But I’m interested to hear about other creative ideas for leveraging this medium, so leave some comments.  Oh, and feel free to share a link to your own online resume.

How to fix the ‘The plugin does not have a valid header’ error when activating a WordPress plugin

You want to extend WordPress’ functionality and decided to download some plugins found in the Official WordPress Plugin repository. After searching the repo, you’ve found two plugins that accomplishes the tasks you needed to implement in your blog. Downloading the plugins gives you two ZIP files that when double-clicked, shows you the contents in the following format:

plugin-a.zip

plugin-a-folder
---- plugin-a-main-file.php
---- plugin-a-readme.txt

plugin-b.zip

plugin-b-folder
---- plugin-b-subfolder
-------- plugin-b-main-file.php
-------- plugin-b-readme.txt

There are two ways to install a plugin. Option 1 is to unzip the file and upload the contents to wordpress_root/wp-content/plugins/ directory. Option 2 is to use the Add New -> Upload option found in the left panel bar of the administrative page of WordPress. Let’s assume the two plugins went through the two installation options.

Installing ‘plugin-a.zip’ using Option 1

1. Unzip the file
2. Upload the contents to wordpress_root/wp-content/plugins/
3. Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Installed.
4. Locate plugin and click Activate link.
5. Result:
   Plugin activated.

Installing ‘plugin-a.zip’ using Option 2

1. Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
2. Locate the file plugin-a.zip by clicking the Browse button.
3. Click Install Now button.
4. Result:
   Unpacking the package?
   Installing the plugin?
   Plugin installed successfully.
5. Click Activate Plugin link.
6. Result:
   Plugin activated.

Installing ‘plugin-b.zip’ using Option 1

1. Unzip the file
2. Upload the contents to wordpress_root/wp-content/plugins/
3. Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Installed.
4. Locate plugin and click Activate link.
5. Error: Plugin does not exists in the list.

Installing ‘plugin-b.zip’ using Option 2

1. Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
2. Locate the file plugin-b.zip by clicking the Browse button.
3. Click Install Now button.
4. Result:
   Unpacking the package?
   Installing the plugin?
   Plugin installed successfully.
5. Click Activate Plugin link.
6. WordPress ? Error
   The plugin does not have a valid header.

Based on our testing, plugin-b.zip seems to fail on both methods of installation. To find out what is causing the error, we have to understand how the plugin installation works. Upon checking the core files I found this excerpt in get_plugins() function:

* WordPress only supports plugin files in the base plugins directory
* (wp-content/plugins) and in one directory above the plugins directory
* (wp-content/plugins/my-plugin). The file it looks for has the plugin data and
* must be found in those two locations. It is recommended that do keep your
* plugin files in directories.

The plugin data that the function is looking for can be found below:

01

02

/*

03	Plugin Name: Name Of The Plugin

04	Plugin URI: http://URI_Of_Page_Describing_Plugin_and_Updates

05	Description: A brief description of the Plugin.

06	Version: The Plugin's Version Number, e.g.: 1.0

07	Author: Name Of The Plugin Author

08	Author URI: http://URI_Of_The_Plugin_Author

09	License: A "Slug" license name e.g. GPL2

10

*/

11

?>

So in order to properly install and activate a plugin, the following two conditions must be satisfied:

• that a plugin main file (.php) must be placed in plugins root folder or in first-level subdirectory within plugins folder
• and it should contain the necessary plugin data for identification/validation purposes

In the case of plugin-b.zip, although the main PHP file contains the needed plugin data, the validate_plugin() function returned an error since neither the file can be found or check if it contains the plugin data because it is placed in the second level subdirectory, a directory location in which the function is not designed to scan the content.
To fix the plugin-b.zip file, it needs to have the following content structure:

plugin-b.zip

plugin-b-folder
---- plugin-b-main-file.php
---- plugin-b-readme.txt

I hope this post will enlighten WordPress users who wants to maximize their blog’s potential

What is new in Joomla 1.7 vs Joomla 1.6?

The Joomla team  recentlyannounced Joomla 1.7 is now stable for live sites.  This new version fixes a variety of issues with Joomla 1.6 as well as introduces the ability to upgrade to future versions from within the Administrator panel.

No more uploading via FTP, hooray!

This marks the first step towards a upgrade system that is similar to WordPress, thus making your life as an administrator easier.  The Joomla 1.7 release does not bring a huge amount of changes, but it is a vital step in the right direction for Joomla and it’s new release schedule.  In this article I will cover what is new, if you need to upgrade, and why I used such an ugly graphic for this post.

What are the newest and biggest features?

• One click upgrades – Starting from Joomla 1.6 you can upgrade your install by going to:  Extensions -> Extension Manager -> Update -> Find updates.
• Faster release cycles - Short term releases will be changing every six months and only supported for one month after the next release.
• Multi-Language improvements – Associate menu items to different languages.

There are a variety of other minor changes that you can review on the officialJoomla 1.7 page.

Thank you Joomla

Do I really need to upgrade?

Depending on what version of Joomla your site(s) are on now, this may be the last time you have to do a “scary upgrade”.   Scary meaning doing it all via FTP and hoping you didn’t miss any upgrade instructions or caveats.  Upgrading is really easy since J1.6, so this shouldn’t be a huge deal.

It’s also important to note that Joomla 1.6 will go end of life in August 2011.   That means no more security updates or patches or fixes for vulnerabilities.  If your site get’s hacked 6 months from now due to some kid developing some obscure technique, you will only have yourself to blame–not Joomla.  Upgrade them sites!

I am on Joomla 1.5.  How do I do it?

There is no upgrade path from J1.5 to J1.6 or J1.7.   You will have to migrate.  There are a variety of changes from J1.5 to newer versions including changes to tables and the ACL (access control list) so a migration is the only way.  If you are comfortable with migrating from different Joomla releases you probably have a system in place.   If not, you can try out this extension.  I personally have not tried it, but it seems pretty straightforward.  Take all the usual precautions and backup your databases and files before doing something like this.   Try it on your development site first and test the process before doing it on a live site.

I am on Joomla 1.6.  How do I do it?

It’s easy peasy if you already made the leap to Joomla 1.6.   Just go to: Extensions -> Extension Manager -> Update -> Find updates.

What’s up with that ugly Joomla image you used in the beginning of the article?

Kids refrigerator magnets are cute, cheap and fun.  They also stick to anything metal.  Slapping some fridge magnets on a whiteboard or something metal or *gasp*, your actual fridge is a good way to nag yourself that this upgrade is very important and needs to be done soon.

Do I have to worry about extensions breaking?

As with any upgrade there is always the potential for things to break.  You should never do a upgrade or migration without some tested and proven way to revert back to a working site if it all goes pear shaped.   The changes from J1.6 to J1.7 are pretty minor, but ther are so many extensions that do so many things, it’s hard to make a blanket statement.

How about you?

Do you have any tips or tricks I didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments, we would love to hear from you.

Angry Birds....!

Angry Birds

Industrial Training on FOSS! Share Your Feedback and Get Updated with Latest in FOSS Industry!

Live Blogging : Yahoo Open Hack 2010, Bangalore

1. YQL by Chris!
2. YAP by Lavanya and Balachandar:

App is defined by gadget XML : defines open apps, meta data
Conforms to OpenSocial Standards

YahooSmall View, YahooFullView,Preview ->YML Works only on these

Yahoo Small View:
->No JS, Faster, HTML or YMLLite, two state(default, personalised)
Yahoo Full View:
->Support HTML,CSS, YML, YUI , Caja friendly JS, rich interface, opensocial,  YML adds allows ad,

Preview View:
-> Content to those who have not signed in, haven't installed, motivated to install, yml:customize tag for installing app, no user info is passed to app,


Yahoo MarkUp Language:

similar in format like XML

Caja:
->Tansform JS and XML to secure form
->prevents insecure JS
YUI is a library of JS utilities and controls for building rich interactive web application.

Open social and its Compatibility

-> OSML and Open Social Templates are in beta stage
->support Open Social 0.9 JS API's and open social 0.8.1 RESTful api.


Sample Gadget XML
Caja is where insecure js is prevented and for stripping out unreliable content, YUI supports accelerated design.

Libraries to use:
Caja, opensocial, YUI, YML

Sections at Gadget XML:

• Module per section -> covers meta data for app-> to make searched and featured by yahoo,title for app, screenshot  url's, 

Steps to create  Gadget XML:

check out : http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/ 

 check out-> YDN Devtool Page


Yahoo Social API's
->design a Open Application Or OAuth
select *from social.profile where guid=me;
select * from social.contact where guid=me/guid info;
select * from social.updates where guid=me;
select * from social.updates.search where query='ipad';
select * from updates.search where source='appid';

MeMe:
check out : http://developers.yahoo.com/meme/

insert into meme.user.posts(type,content, caption)values("photos", "http://yahoo.com", "this is a photo caption")

Social SDK's

• examples for opensocial, php, python
• perform oAuth Authentication

Host your Social Apps @ Joyent, google app engine, amazon web services,

What came First, the chicken or the Egg?

British researchers may have uncovered a partial answer to the age-old question, "what came first the chicken or the egg?"

According to a team, comprising researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield, the answer is "chicken" or at least a particular chicken protein.
There is, however, a further twist - this particular chicken protein turns out to come both first and last. That neat trick it performs provides new insights into control of crystal growth which is key to egg shell production.
Scientists have long believed that a chicken eggshell protein called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) must play some role in egg shell formation. The protein is found only in the mineral region of the egg (the hard part of the shell) and lab bench results showed that it appeared to influence the transformation of (CaCo3) into calcite crystals. The mechanism of this control remained unclear. How this process could be used to form an actual eggshell remained unclear.
University of Warwick researchers Mark Rodger and David Quigley, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, have now been able to apply a powerful computing tool called metadynamics and the UK national supercomputer in Edinburgh to crack this egg problem.
Dr David Quigley from the Department of Physics and Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, said: "Metadynamics extends conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and is particularly good at sampling transitions between disordered and ordered states of matter."
Using these tools, the team was able to create simulations that showed exactly how the protein bound to amorphous calcium carbonate surface using two clusters of "arginine residues", located on two loops of the protein and creating a literal chemical "clamp" to nano sized particles of calcium carbonate.
While clamped in this way, the OC-17 encourages the nanoparticles of calcium carbonate to transform into "calcite crystallites" that form the tiny of nucleus of crystals that can continue to grow on their own. But they also noticed that sometimes this chemical clamp didn't work. The OC-17 just seemed to detatch from the nanoparticle or "be desorbed".
Professor Mark Rodger from Department of Chemistry and Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, said: "With the larger nanoparticles we examined we found that the binding sites for this chemical clamp were the same as the smaller nanoparticles but the binding was much weaker. In the simulations we performed, the protein never desorbed from the smaller nanoparticle, but always fell off or desorbed from the larger one. However in each case, desorption occurred at or after nucleation of calcite."
The researchers had therefore uncovered an incredibly elegant process allowing highly efficient recycling of the OC-17 protein. Effectively it acts as a catalyst, clamping on to calcium carbonate particles to kickstart crystal formation and then dropping off when the crystal nucleus is sufficiently large to grow under its own steam. This frees up the OC-17 to promote more yet more crystallisation, facilitating the speedy, literally overnight creation of an egg shell.
The researchers believe that this new insight into the elegant and highly efficient methods of promoting and controlling crystallisation in nature will be of great benefit to anyone exploring how to promote and control artificial forms of crystallisation. '
The study appears in the international edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie.