Posts from — February 2009

The following are tips that can help you increase search-engine traffic to a blogspot/blogger.com blog.

Step 1 – account settings

1) Blog Title: Title of your blog, this should be short and to the point.
2) Description: This should include keywords related to your blog topic. Also make sure to write complete sentences.
3) Add your blog to our listings? yes. You can get exposure here because it will be presented in various lists around blogger.com.
4) Allow Blog Feeds: Short. Having a short feed is usually better because it gives people a reason to visit your site to read the rest.
5) Post Feed Redirect URL: Get a feedburner account. This will make it easier for people to subscribe to your RSS feed and you can keep track of the number of subscribers.
6) Show Email Post links: yes

Step 2 – remove the top search bar


This will not only make your site look more professional, but your content will get indexed faster.

Use the following code to remove the top bar:

#navbar {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}

The HTML from your template can be edited by going to Layout->Edit HTML. The above should be pasted underneath <b:skin><![CDATA[/*

While looking through the various job sites on the Internet, I found the following list of the highest paying jobs in the U.S. It’s interesting to see how the different types of jobs in the tech industry compare to other industries.

Top Paying Jobs Overall

Here are some tips that may help you when you apply for your next tech job:

• List your technical knowledge first, in an organized way. Your technical strengths must stand out clearly at the beginning of your resume. Ultimately, your resume is going to be read by a thoughtful human being, but before it gets to that point it often has to be categorized by an administrative clerk, and make its way past various sorts of key word searches. Therefore, you should list as many directly relevant buzz words as you can which reflect your knowledge and experience. List all operating systems and UNIX flavors you know. List all programming languages and platforms with which you’re experienced. List all software you are skilled with. Make it obvious at a glance where your strengths lie – whether the glance is from a hiring manager, a clerk, or a machine.
• List your qualifications in order of relevance, from most to least. Only list your degree and educational qualifications first if they are truly relevant to the job for which you are applying. If you’ve already done what you want to do in a new job, by all means, list it first, even if it wasn’t your most recent job. Abandon any strict adherence to a chronological ordering of your experience.
• Quantify your experience wherever possible. Cite numerical figures, such as monetary budgets/funds saved, time periods/efficiency improved, lines of code written/debugged, numbers of machines administered/fixed, etc. which demonstrate progress or accomplishments due directly to your work.
• Begin sentences with action verbs. Portray yourself as someone who is active, uses their brain, and gets things done. Stick with the past tense, even for descriptions of currently held positions, to avoid confusion.
• Don’t sell yourself short. This is by far the biggest mistake of all resumes, technical and otherwise. Your experiences are worthy for review by hiring managers. Treat your resume as an advertisement for you. Be sure to thoroughly “sell” yourself by highlighting all of your strengths. If you’ve got a valuable asset which doesn’t seem to fit into any existing components of your resume, list it anyway as its own resume segment.
• Be concise. As a rule of thumb, resumes reflecting five years or less experience should fit on one page. More extensive experience can justify usage of a second page. Consider three pages (about 15 years or more experience) an absolute limit. Avoid lengthy descriptions of whole projects of which you were only a part. Consolidate action verbs where one task or responsibility encompasses other tasks and duties. Minimize usage of articles (the, an, a) and never use “I” or other pronouns to identify yourself.
• Omit needless items. Leave all these things off your resume: social security number, marital status, health, citizenship, age, scholarships, irrelevant awards, irrelevant associations and memberships, irrelevant publications, irrelevant recreational activities, a second mailing address (”permanent address” is confusing and never used), references, reference of references (”available upon request”), travel history, previous pay rates, previous supervisor names, and components of your name which you really never use (i.e. middle names).
• Have a trusted friend review your resume. Be sure to pick someone who is attentive to details, can effectively critique your writing, and will give an honest and objective opinion. Seriously consider their advice. Get a third and fourth opinion if you can.
• Proofread, proofread, proofread. Be sure to catch all spelling errors, grammatical weaknesses, unusual punctuation, and inconsistent capitalizations. Proofread it numerous times over at least two days to allow a fresh eye to catch any hidden mistakes.
• Laser print it on plain, white paper. Handwriting, typing, dot matrix printing, and even ink jet printing look pretty cheesy. Stick with laser prints. Don’t waste your money on special bond paper, matching envelopes, or any color deviances away from plain white. Your resume will be photocopied, faxed, and scanned numerous times, defeating any special paper efforts, assuming your original resume doesn’t first end up in the circular file

Finalizing Your Resume

• Resumes should be concise and in a manageable document length.
• Your Name and Page Number should be located on every page, just in case pages become separated while in the hands of the prospective employer.
  (The Name and Page number can be in the Header or Footer part of the resume, or at the top of the page using a smaller font size, to avoid distracting the reader. Page Numbers can be written as: Page 2, Page Two, Page 2 of 3, or Page Two of Three.)
• Do not put a photograph of yourself on the resume. Potential employers will not be hiring you based on your looks! However, International candidates will need to send their scanned photograph to the Systems Integration Solutions, Inc. International Department representative along with the final formatted resume.
• Type your resume in a word processing document and back it up on a disk. Updating your resume then becomes easy. If you are not a typist, ask a professional to type it.
• Use one typeface such as Times New Roman, Arial, or other traditional typeface. The standard font size is 11 point. Headers may be increased to 12 point.
• Margins should be no less than one inch on sides, top, and bottom. The white space serves as a border and keeps the resume from looking cluttered.
• Avoid underlining within the resume narrative. If you have written the statements well, they will need no further emphasis.
• Always do a print preview of each page of your resume, to view the layout and spacing.
• E-mail your resume document, with a short introduction letter to your Systems Integration Solutions, Inc. contact. The document can then be opened, printed, and distributed to clients.
• Laser-print your completed resume or have it professionally typeset.
• Give or mail an interviewer your resume printed on an off-white, tan, or light gray quality bond paper. Never give them a photocopy of your resume.

Twitter is a great way to keep your friends updated with events and other interesting info, but it can also be used as a marketing tool for companies to announce new products, keep existing customers updated with company news, and get new customers interested in your products.

The following are five applications (or services) that can help you organize and promote your business on twitter:

1) Twitter tools

This is a wordpress plugin by Alex King. It creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

This is a must-have for anyone with a wordpress blog. It is very easy to setup (you just need to choose a couple of settings and add your twitter username and password information) and it allows you to quickly notify your friends on twitter when you have a new post on your blog.

Features:

• Automatically create tweets through your blog posts
• Create blog posts from your tweets
• Daily digest posts from your tweets (experimental)
• Weekly digest posts from your tweets (experimental)

Download it Here

2) Socialtoo.com

Socialtoo is a free service that keeps track of all the people that have followed or unfollowed you and gives you the ability to automatically send a confirmation message to anyone that follows you (such as a link to your website).

Features:

• Automatically Send a message to people that follow you
• Automatically follow people that follow you
• Blacklist users and prevent them from following you
• Follow anybody that has followed you in the past (premium service)
• Create and share surveys

Signup here

3) twitter.com search

Although this isn’t a separate application, the twitter.com global search needs to be mentioned. It can be used to search through tweets and users to see if anyone is talking about your company or products.

Search on twitter here

4) twhirl

Anyone serious about twitter should get twhirl. It is a desktop application that runs on the adobe air platform.

Features:

• connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts
• shorten long URLs (using bit.ly, snurl, twurl or is.gd)
• search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan, and follow topics in near-real time with saved searches
• automatically find tweets mentinoning your @username

Download here

5) tweetburner.com

A very good tool to track how many people click a link you’ve shared on twitter. Very useful to see what your followers like.

Site here

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more popular. They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of your browser.

I have compiled a list of 15 Social Bookmarking websites that you can use for submitting your own bookmarks.

1) bookmarksync – http://bookmarksync.com/

2) Delicious – http://www.Delicious.com

3) digg – http://www.digg.com

4) Diigo – http://www.diigo.com

5) Faves.com - http://www. faves.com

6) givealink.org - http://givealink.org/

Note: GiveALink is a social bookmarking site where people can donate their bookmarks to the Web community and to science. As an ongoing academic research project, our goal is to analyze bookmark files to build new Web mining techniques including new ways to search, recommend, personalize, and visualize the Web.

7) linkwad.com – http://linkwad.com/

8 ) yahoo bookmarks – http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/

Note: This is yahoo’s replacement for “yahoo my web”, which will be shutdown on March 19th, 2009.

9) Mister wong - http://www.mister-wong.com/

10) propeller.com – http://www.Propeller.com

11) stumpedia.com – http://www.stumpedia.com/

Note: Stumpedia is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. Stumpedia does not depend on bots, algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.

12) Microsoft live favorites – http://favorites.live.com/

Note: Bookmarking interface only works with IE.

13) dzone – http://www.dzone.com

Note: Accepts only technology related links.

14) fuzzfizz – http://www.fuzzfizz.com/

15) linkroll – http://www.linkroll.com