The first thing you do is to put your resume all over these job sites, that advertise that the most amazing dream job is available if you join their site. Of course, jobs posted on these sites are all way too good for you.

Wanted: A Derp De Derp Developer

• Must have 12 years of Java K3 Blurgle Platform experience
• Must have 7 years experience AS A Derp De Derp Developer, no a Derp Developer will not do.
• Must have experience in our exact industry, experience in our exact company is a plus.
• Must also be an excellent French chef.

Yes, the postings look exactly like this, but with far more bullet points. Also, especially in the case of technical positions, you are looking at postings by 4 or 5 of these “staffing firms”, and have no idea who you’ll actually be working for.

I believe that unless you fit into a certain niche, the only effective thing you can do with a site like this is to upload your resume. Every day. Make sure it shows up at the top, because what will happen is that recruiters from these staffing firms are often looking for positions that aren’t posted, and they will call you one day.

That’s it.

I mean, you’ll find a lot of job postings online, and they may help you, but as far as the internet goes, it does little to directly aid in an effective job search. In fact, I found a lot more “junk” than useful information about employment opportunities. The best way to “find” a job is to talk to people, not click a “submit application” button over and over.

As you can imagine, I got that phone call a few months ago, and this is why I’ve not been working on this blog or website very much. More later!

Additionally, I am working on two new additions to the Work page that displays only live sites that I’ve worked on. In other words, I am making real websites, but they are not finished yet. Sometimes it takes a while for the owners of a particular site to provide feedback on their design before the final production site is to be released, and that is quite understandable. A lot of these folks are busy actually running their businesses than thinking about what they want in a final header image.

Another note on sites: Many sites don’t need a “blog” or a feed or articles taking over their front page, but rather some links to current news or information. That’s why this site now has only the recent posts displayed to the side, to demonstrate this capability.

“My great-greatgrandfather Daniel Scott III came to this town with only a dream, to bring important information by pony to everyone, for a reasonable fee.” Behold concept art #1.

On Original Artwork

Well now that I’ve completed two owl paintings, it’s about time to have them scanned in a higher quality than my Android phone camera. I went about fixing up the blue owl, giving him a better background and slightly enhanced colors. (The photograph that inspired this showed a blue background, while I used a black one)

The other owl is a curious image. The actual photograph shows none of the owl’s body at all, only a head. Perhaps it is peering out of the darkness, leaning over? We may never know for sure, because all we see is a floating owl head.

The next research will be on painting certain textures (like rocks) better, as well as trees and other forest props. These owls come in very blank backgrounds, but this is not a bad thing at all given their spooky context. Also, I have another use for paintings with blank backgrounds.

I was recently asked to show that I knew my way around photoshop and illustrator, and since my current official work has someone else doing the graphics, I decided to make a Spec Graphics page. Using my own artwork is preferable for such things, because rights issues is thorny. Even Creative Commons licenses make you have to write down your source and include an attribution somewhere.

Finding Other Sources

Since I don’t have incredible large amounts of time to create spec artwork to use in digital design wizardry, I decided I will use Creative Commons licensed images and do my best to keep a log of where they came from. To do the sorts of works that I want to do, I need access to pictures of just about anything, and can’t be spending too much on stock photography for spec demonstrations.

Speaking of money I’ve also somehow found decent open-source solutions to software that costs the same as a used car. For Photoshop, the answer is obvious, The Gimp. Illustrator has Inkscape, and InDesign has Scribus. I’m not sure if I’m crazy about Scribus yet, but it’s a good thing that print design is not my priority.

Most websites look very similar under the hood. Here is a basic “wireframe” for both the redesign of this site (my first 100% custom WordPress theme!) and another site I’m working on.  But enough about that, let’s take a look at what I did last week:

Before

The original Yahoo SiteBuilder template. (Screenshot doesn’t show this layout is not centered.)

After

Same page in hand-coded HTML5/CSS3, designed by me. (Layout is centered!)

“I don’t have the number.”

“Can’t you look it up?”

“There’s no phone book!”

“Well…call directory assistance!”

Yes, I actually overheard this.

Notes:

• Pizza Hut and many other pizza places let you order online from their websites.
• Even if you don’t want to order online, you can get the number of the location nearest you pretty quickly.
• If you’re out stranded with only your Android phone, you can look up the number and hold your finger down on any phone number, and the phone will give you the option to call the number.

Once I did get the eyes into the picture, the little guy came to life immediately. It took several layers and additions to get the beak and the ear tufts right.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on three website projects for some small businesses that have never had a web presence before. Like with the painting, the individual pieces make no sense, but as a whole it all began coming together quite nicely.

Before my next paintings, I’ll pursue what the Internet has to say about improving painting techniques, as well as the web design. That should make some interesting articles here.

Meet Bob Ferry and his nice ‘ride’: a 1906 Oldsmobile Model B Runabout. You might be thinking, “Wow, for a model that’s nearly a century old, this car looks brand new.” That’s because it is brand new. Bob found old magazines and publications on mechanics with pictures, diagrams and descriptions, by searching the digital treasure trove of Google Books, which helped him build the car from scratch.

I’ve been excited about the availability of books online for quite some time now, and here’s the real reason why.

He had heard of ebooks, so he went over to Google Books and discovered many old books and magazines about the earliest automobiles from the early 1900s. He loaded them up onto his iPad using his Google Books app and got to work.

I’m sure that this man could’ve searched library after library trying to find an obscure and out-of-print publications without knowing what he was looking for, and maybe have found a copy of it at that silly microfilm machine, but he would only do so after a very long time of searching.

Incidentally, here is one of the things he found. Looking at the July 5, 1905 edition, I am wondering if he will next construct the 12 passenger 16 HP “wagonette”, which was a steal at $2200.

Notes:

• Google Books Reader app is available for ALL devices imaginable, including that awful Barnes and Noble thing.
• Many items are free and many are for “sale”, just like the Amazon Kindle store.
• This is filed under “creativity”, because I doubt any of the info Mr. Ferry used was strict tutorials in the ehow.com sense of the word!

In order to use WordPress for a “real” website, I need to to understand its taxonomy system. Since the last time I had a simple blog on WordPress, it seemed like you only had the tags, not the categories. So I started posting away creating a new category for every tag. Now look at the sloppy mess I made!

So what’s the difference between categories and tags? Let’s ask WordPress support:

The use of tags is entirely optional (although each post must be attached to at least one category).

Well I’m glad we got that straightened out! Let’s ask someone else out there:

Categories are your site’s table of contents.

This only confirms something I already figured out.

The taxonomy of your site is something that should be determined even before you add content to it. Sometimes you have content already in the queue for your unpublished website, so figuring out the categories you’re going to be using is pretty easy. And once you get into that whole “custom content type” thing, that planning ahead is also important.

Taxonomy for an animal news website would be easy to figure out. Because we don’t want to have posts about all the species of insects or jellyfish (too many of them!), we could go by class: Mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, fish with bones, and whatever other class the animal-studying community has added since I was in 10th grade. Once this is set, then each article would be inserted into one of those. We can split the posts with a menu system later, so that users can go to the Mammals link and only see articles about polar bears, hippos, and monkeys.

Notes:

• A brief study of websites on animal classification seems to reveal arthropods belong in the same list as vertebrates! ha!
• Wikipedia’s cited listings seems to indicate that your 10th grade Biology left out a lot of stuff.
• Drupal’s taxonomy system keeps “categories” as “terms” which are under a “vocabulary”. You can make several of these word-trees if you need.
• One reason I switched back to WordPress is that Drupal’s capability to split pages/feeds by categories needed further study to get it functioning properly.

The keywords “grow cilantro”.

A while back, I did want to know what to do with this cilantro plant that I got. So I ran over to the usual suspect and put the keywords in. How will these other browsers measure up when I search for the same thing?

I went through these and looked for the top result, for that first impression.

Google

For comparison, I also looked in the “original”. The first result was a site called sunset.com and the second was from vegetablegardener.com. Keep note of that second result for later…

link

1. Duck Duck Go

It took a result from wikihow and put an abstract of it in a neat red box at the top. The first listed result was from a site called howtodothings.com.

link

2. Blekko

Very interesting! The first result ignored all the wikihows and ehows and went straight to vegetablegardener.com. You will not see ehow, wikihow, howdotodthings.com at all on the first page.

link

3. Bing

Same result as duckduckgo, but without the neat box from wikihow.

link

4. Wolfram Alpha

This is a totally different sort of search engine, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It took my search and returned to me the nutritional data on cilantro! An additional click through informs me that the species name for cilantro is Coriandrum sativum.

link

The Conclusion

Google seems to have been truly improving its own results. I was expecting it to match Bing or Duckduckgo in this experiment. Instead it matched most closely with Blekko, only including a few of those “how to” sites that Blekko leaves out. So I believe Blekko is the best in this test, followed by Google, and Duckduckgo with its little red box has promise of usefulness for some searches. Additionally, Wolfram Alpha seems to have a use all of its own.

Note: To be fair, I have ehow.com blocked on my Google site block list. It may appear for other people.