Ups and Downs and Everything In Between

I’m looking for work in the field of (as you probably guessed) web development and design. My father is a graphic artist so I’ve got some connections that way but as usual it turns out you can do very little without other people. (In my case, my father’s connections.)

So he told me to go check out Craigslist to look for additional work.

Well, here’s what I think about that:

I looked through Craigslist’s several categories for job postings.

The bottom line on Craigslist is this: it’s free to post. It’s free to respond. It’s all anonymous.

Which means:

1. It’s limited to only what recruiters post, which is an estimated 30% of the actual job openings. (www.job-hunt.org) Not to mention, this is an utterly random technique.
2. Each poster is probably inundated with replies daily. It’s too competitive.
3. Employers over-specify the necessary skills and experience needed for the job, creating a job posting with requirements that no one can meet (e.g., 10 years of experience with a technology that’s only 7 or 8 years old). Besides, job seekers over-apply. Also according to job-hunt.org: “Many recruiters have shared with me that they don’t like to advertise a job opportunity because they receive so many responses from unqualified applicants, an estimated 80% to 90% of responses. Job seekers view it as a “why-not” opportunity; recruiters see it as more dumb (or lazy) applicants who didn’t pay attention or don’t understand what is required.”
4. It’s a lose/lose situation. You lose because you must spend a lot of time finding and combing through job opportunities for the ones that match your qualifications and/or interest you. The recruiters lose because they must comb through hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes to find the truly qualified applicants.

And that is why job postings on craigs list suck.

Believe me, I know. [The organization I currently work for] posts its [entry level job] openings on Craigslist. And we get over 50 responses daily!

-m

P.S. That’s why I want to get [our new client's] site up (last week). That would be word-of-mouth. It taps a potential market never available to people responding to job postings, it’s less work, and it’s ultimately higher paying.

Yay! As of this moment, I’m standards-friendly.

This is actually my first successful attempt at XHTML 1.0 Strict. I’m glad it went so smoothly.

Ever since I discovered RSS I’ve been hooked on it. More specifically, I unsubscribed from all (read: most) of my email newsletter alerts and subscribed instead to their XML counterparts.

RSS is a type of XML used for providing quick ‘n dirty descriptions for “news” which is defined in practice (though, not in theory) as anything about a web site that changes. This makes RSS ideally suited for blogs, as well as news sites — obviously. In addition to RSS, there is Atom which is basically the same thing in a different format and what I use to syndicate this blog. T’is still XML though.

Anyway, while perusing my 168 new articles I found the following of special note: FOXSports.com :: NHL. Apparently, FOXSports.com has added newsfeeds to its site and syndicating them with the major feed directories like NewsIsFree.

This is interesting to me because I couldn’t possibly imagine an NHL or boxing fan to get their sports news of a news agreggator. But maybe their out there. Or rather, perhaps this is a case of “build it and they will come.”

Further proof that RSS is indeed growing massively popular.

This is bizarre, fun, and very cool. Type a few words such as the beginning of a sentence and let Google finish the rest for you. Try it out.

Duude, I could play with this for hours!

I’ve been trying to get Danica to switch from using Internet Explorer for browsing the web over to Firefox. Nothing really seemed to make any difference. Tabbed browsing was nice but not impressive. Better support for CSS means nothing except to web designers. The google search bar wasn’t getting much attention. But now that I’ve added the IMDB search plugin to the searchbar, things are beginning to change.

Thank you, searchbar.

Everyone’s favorite program. Now, a blog entry. :)