The tech-enabled job hunt

Tracking job opportunities can be tedious, particularly when companies use static pages to list their vacancies. The following methods can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your online search.

Tracking jobs with RSS feeds

The best option for tracking jobs, of course, is through the company’s own RSS feeds. Many companies provide said feeds, and in this case it’s simple: visit the site, subscribe with your newsreader, and wait for new opportunities to roll in.

Nice – but what about the (vast majority) of companies that don’t provide feeds?

Tracking jobs with OmniWeb

With its ability to periodically check your bookmarked sites for changes, OmniWeb (Mac only) can be an invaluable tool in the job hunt. Simply set your bookmarks and let it do the legwork for you.

Workflow:

Find an organization of interest
Bookmark the organization’s HR page, setting OmniWeb to check for changes daily
Monitor your Dock for OmniWeb bookmark updates

This is, incidentally, the method by which I found my first job in D.C. It works with the majority of companies I’ve looked at.

Creating custom job feeds

A third option is to create your own RSS feed for a company or organization. Feedity and Dapper allow you to create custom feeds from web pages. Dapper is a more powerful service, but Feedity is simpler to set up and doesn’t require an account, so I’ll use Feedity in this example.

Suppose you’re looking for a job with the Omni Group. (In reality, they already provide a job feed; we’ll just pretend they don’t for the sake of example.)

Find the HR page and copy the URL.
Go to Feedity.com and paste the URL in the main field. (If you have the Feedity bookmarklet installed, a single click from the HR page will do this for you.) Select a category for the feed and choose “Preview”:

Feedity will show you the links it has extracted; this represents the content that will show up in its RSS feed. If you’re not satisfied with the results, select “Try refining…” to hone in on the results you want to appear in your subscription.
When you’re ready, you can subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon, or select from their other subscription options:

Limitations

Some job sites are more interested in tracking you than letting you track them. This can be a problem if each visit results in unique page URLs being generated for the job pages. In this case, Feedity will think each job is new every time it crawls the site — so you’ll get duplicates.

In cases like this, try using OmniWeb, or see if you can get results out of Monster, LinkedIn, etc.

Access 1Password data on your PC via Firefox

5/26/10 update: I haven’t tried this in a couple years, so consider these directions outdated. If you have any luck, feel free to leave a comment.

Important: As of 8/6/08, version 2.7.2 works interchangeably with the current versions, but this may change without notice.

Updated 7/28/08 to address truncation issues with Safari

1Password, the acclaimed password manager for Mac, recently introduced an iPhone export function that provides on-the-go access to sensitive data. This is accomplished by creating an encrypted bookmarklet in Safari, which is in turn synchronized to your iPhone. Excellent.

Firefox recognizes this bookmarklet as well — meaning that Windows-by-day users no longer have to suffer without their critical logins. (Note that this trick does not work with Internet Explorer.)

To accomplish this:

In 1Password, click on the “Sync to iPhone” icon in the toolbar and choose an access code for encryption. (This will create the bookmarklet in Safari.)
Switch to your Safari bookmarks, where you will find two new categories, each with a bookmarklet. The 1Password bookmarklet enables a browsable list of all your 1Password data; the 1Password Logins bookmarklet provides a one-click login to the current page.

The data in the Address column is what you need to copy to your PC; however, Safari only lets you copy the first 32,000 characters of a bookmark’s address field, so copying from here is likely to fail. To work around this, drag the bookmark to Firefox on your Mac (either directly or via the Finder) to copy the data there. Then, in Firefox, select the bookmarklet properties. This is what you’ll see:

Hit Tab once to select the Location field. Copy the text into a plain-text file, and email it to yourself.
Get it onto your Windows machine. (Easiest method: email it to yourself using the aforementioned plain text file.)
Finally, create your bookmarklet in Firefox. To do this, first bookmark any page to your Firefox bookmarks bar. Then, right-click on the bookmark and choose “Properties”. Rename it as desired (“1P” suffices for my needs), and replace the Location field with the long string you emailed to yourself. For the 1Password bookmarklet, you’ll want to select “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”. For the 1Password Logins bookmarklet, leave it deselected.

Firefox now has a secure, functional bookmarklet with your passwords and other data available.

1Password Logins bookmarklet in action:

1Password bookmarklet in action:

(Use of the search function is recommended here as the tool sorts web forms by name)

1Password also provides a full-fledged html export, which you can keep on a thumb drive or upload to a server. (I wouldn’t recommend uploading the file — out of 6 billion people in the world, surely someone is bound to find the file and start playing.)

Bonus: For even easier synchronization, install Foxmarks to synchronize your Firefox bookmarks between your Mac and PC. Now you can copy straight from Safari to Firefox on your Mac and let Foxmarks do the synching. Update: Foxmarks didn’t work with the 1Password bookmarklets the last time I tried it; your mileage may vary.

OmniFocus Defer Script

OmniFocus rocks. I can’t really imagine managing myself personally or professionally without this tool. Nevertheless, despite thousands of hours of development and beta testing, it has its share of quirks. Notably, in my work I have a few daily-type tasks I set to repeat every day. Unfortunately, there’s no “workday” option in the repeat choices, so every weekend I end up with a Saturday and Sunday repetition. I could either:

Mark them complete (ignoring the fact that I’ve just claimed to have done nonexistent work);
Mark them complete and delete the “done” items before they disappear (solving the first issue)
Change the start/due dates in the Inspector (cumbersome)

AppleScript to the rescue.

My Defer script allows you to defer, or ‘snooze’, selected projects or tasks by a given number of days. (Disclaimer for GTD pedants: my use of the word “defer” here is sanctioned by the New Oxford American Dictionary, not David Allen.)

Usage: Select the task(s) and/or project(s) you wish to defer. Invoke the script from the toolbar or script menu:

Enter the number of days to defer the items in the resulting dialog box and select “OK” (default is 1, so feel free to just hit Return to ‘snooze for a day’).

The script will then prompt you whether to defer both start and end dates of the items. “Due [date] only” is the default option, so again, feel free to hit return to snooze your due date only.

Finally: a Growl notification to signify your success. (If desired, you can use a standard OS alert dialog or no alert at all. See the script for details.)

Download here.

19 Feb 2009: version 0.2 is now available. Release notes here. Download link is for current version.

XMind 2008 updated to version 2.2

XMind 2.2 was released last week. The upgrade introduces some improvements and bug fixes (list here), although printing remains buggy.

I’ve submitted formal feedback re: the printing issues; please do the same. Mango Software, the company behind XMind, have been very responsive to my emails in the past.

Quickly file Exchange-based emails using Entourage

Managing the torrential flow of work email used to be an onerous task, but a healthy combination of email habits and scripts simplify the flow greatly. Personal experience has demonstrated that email is best handled with a GTD-inspired triage system, à la this one. Spotlight on the Mac and Copernicus on Windows make dredging up old emails a cinch.

Even with a simplified organization structure, it can be time-consuming (or RSI-inducing) to triage your inbox. I find that when it takes longer than a second or two to file an email, I’m more likely to just leave it in my inbox — defeating the value of the system.

Although Outlook in Windows is my preferred professional email client, I use Entourage for email triage because it’s just faster. With a few simple Applescripts, filing any number of emails is a single keystroke away.

[code lang="AppleScript"] property destFolderName : "@ACTION" property exchangeAccountName : "CHCSII"

tell application "Microsoft Entourage" set destFolder to folder destFolderName of Exchange account exchangeAccountName set currMsgs to (current messages) move currMsgs to destFolder end tell[/code]

Save the script as “Action \ca.scpt” in your Entourage Script Menu folder (located in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/) and you can activate it instantly with Control-A. Change the “\ca” suffix to change the shortcut.

Bonus #1: Change your Caps Lock key to Control in the Keyboard & Mouse control panel (under “Modifier Keys…”) and the script is even easier to activate.

Bonus #2: If you have Growl installed, add the following code below “end tell” in the above script and you’ll get an unobtrusive confirmation that your email has been filed in the right folder (useful for the oh-shoot-did-I-just-move-that-to-the-right-folder moments):

[code lang="AppleScript"]
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"

set the allNotificationsList to {"General", "Move message", "Error"}
set the enabledNotificationsList to {"General", "Move message", "Error"}

register as application ¬
    "Entourage AppleScripts" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
    default notifications enabledNotificationsList ¬
    icon of application "Microsoft Entourage"

--  Error Notification...
if (count of currMsgs) is 0 then
    notify with name ¬
        "Error" title ¬
        "Error" description ¬
        "No message selected." application name "Entourage AppleScripts"
end if

--  1 Notification...
if (count of currMsgs) is 1 then
    notify with name ¬
        "General" title ¬
        "Exchange Notification" description ¬
        "1 message moved to " & name of destFolder application name "Entourage AppleScripts"
end if

--  Multi Notification...
if (count of currMsgs) > 1 then
    notify with name ¬
        "General" title ¬
        "Exchange Notification" description ¬
        "" & (count of currMsgs) & " messages moved to " & name of destFolder & "." application name "Entourage AppleScripts"
end if

end tell[/code]

XMind user survey

For what it’s worth, XMind is soliciting user feedback on the XMind user experience. I’ve already submitted comments regarding the quirks that bother me; please do the same!

Survey here: http://www.xmind.org/us/survey1.html

XMind Review (XMind 2008 Professional for Mac)

XMind is a recently introduced mind mapping tool available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. I purchased XMind several weeks ago and have found it to be a robust and rewarding tool, though it’s certainly not without its issues.

Basic features

Data entry – The ability to quickly add and edit information is the single most important feature of a mind mapping tool, and XMind makes input fast and painless. Return inserts a sibling topic, while Tab inserts a subtopic. (This is a faster interface than MindManager, for instance, which requires command-Return to insert a subtopic.) Return inserts a sibling topic. Command-Return inserts a parent topic, and Shift-Return creates a sibling topic before the selected topic.

Navigation – With a single-button mouse, click-and-hold on any free space in the map to drag the map around. Even easier, right-click drag for instant dragging.

Labeling (tagging) and Notes – Labels can be added to any map item and used to quickly filter large maps. One suggested use would be to attach names to action items. Rich-text notes can also be appended map items, and edited in the map or a sidebar.

Visual editing – XMind includes a wide array of layout and editing options. Topics can be displayed with a variety of orders, from diamonds to callouts. Line options include simple curves, hard and soft elbows, straight lines and more. Spiny (thick) and rainbow lines are available as well.

Numbering options are basic but functional; for each level of the mindmap tree, you can select Roman numerals (I, II, III), Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3), and capital and lowercase letters (A, B, C or a, b, c). In addition, each sheet/tab can have a separate background color or image.

Visual Themes – Most usefully, XMind supports visual themes, which can expedite editing multiple documents. To create a theme, simply edit your document as desired, then select “Extract theme”. A new theme will be created to match your current document styles.

Audio notes can be added quickly to a topic. They’re saved in MP3 format, although currently there doesn’t seem to be a way to extract your audio notes.

Killer feature: embedded layout options

For me, the killer feature of XMind is the ability to utilize multiple layout structures within the same map. Options include traditional mindmapping structures (map, left tree, right tree, logic charts, org charts) as well as 2D chart (analogous to a spreadsheet clipping) and fishbone diagram options.

Although other mappers have this feature, its XMind offers more flexibility than its Mac OS-compatible counterparts.

(Click for full size)

Quirks

Editing

At present, there is no way to create a parent topic with multiple siblings selected; you must create the parent topic for one topic and drag other topics into it.

More frustrating, there is currently no keyboard-only option to edit a topic; typing overwrites the selected topic, so you need to use the mouse for this purpose. (XMind team: please fix this in an upcoming release!) [UPDATE: F2 now enters editing mode for the selected node.]

Format lock

While XMind readily imports from MindManager and FreeMind, it provides no way to save in other formats (MindManager, FreeMind, or even OPML). That said, if you desperately need to share your data, you can copy and paste into OmniOutliner. From there, export to OPML. Other programs can read this format quite easily. [UPDATE: XMind now exports to MindManager 7 format.]

That said, XMind documents have worked flawlessly between my Mac and PC.

Audio Notes

In the map area, you must double-click the Play button to play an audio note. Odd. [UPDATE: A single click now plays the note.]

Printing – caveat emptor!

[UPDATE: Printing has been improved significantly. Retaining this section for historical context, but note that many of these criticisms have been addressed.]

Printing in XMind is seriously flawed. To start, there is no Page Setup dialog box. Any page setup options are performed via a combination of the print dialog box and printer-specific settings. (To get a horizontal page layout, for instance, you have to go select the printer options setting, which brings you first to the OS X-standard Page Setup dialog box, then a Print window. Clicking “Print” from here does not print the document, as one might expect, but brings the user back to the Java print window.)

Worse, XMind has yet to learn the concept of a centered document. Printing with the default 5mm margins yielded a printout that was both off-center and clipped. I tinkered for a while and finally got a well-centered document with a 40mm left margin and 0mm right margin — though the built-in preview has no bearing on the final product. For example, this XMind preview:

…resulted in this print job:

To see what your document will actually look like without wasting paper, go through the printer options setting to the OS X dialog box. Instead of selecting Print, choose Print Preview. Although this will return you to the Java print box, when you finally choose Print you’ll get the Mac preview.

A note about Java

I expected Java to be a major issue for me. On the Mac, I want Mac-like apps with Services support, AppleScript options, etc. That said, XMind has done an amazing job harnessing elements of the Mac OS interface. Notably, it uses the native Mac open and save dialog boxes (failure to do so would have been a deal-breaker for me), and can summon Apple’s Color Picker utility instead of the standard Java fare.

Final thoughts

Although XMind feels like a late beta product, it’s a strong contender for the cross-platform mind mapping market. If on-screen editing (rather than printing) is your intended primary use, give it a whirl.

Also, to their credit, the XMind team have been very responsive — they have responded to several separate email requests and seem intent on improving the product.

Pros:

Extremely robust mapping options
Responsive customer support
Strikingly adept Java implementation on the Mac

Cons:

Printing is extremely frustrating
Java-based means no Mac OS Services; no AppleScript support
No industry-standard export options
Quirky

MacBook as an accelerometer

On a recent bus ride from work to the Vienna Metro station, I noticed the ride was rather rough and decided to take a closer look. Using SeisMac, a tool that uses my MacBook’s sudden motion sensor to take motion measurements, I recorded some key parts of the ride.

Because the computer was on my lap, the Y axis served as a crude accelerometer; when the bus accelerated, the front of the bus was raised a little (and I was therefore pitched back a little, causing the Y-axis reading to increase), and when the bus slowed down I was pitched forward, causing the Y-axis reading to decrease.

Exhibit 1: I-66

Getting on I-66, we began accelerating significantly at about 6:17:25. We hit traffic pretty abruptly and slowed down at 6:17:45, and then hit some rough potholes around :53 (see the Z-axis)…

Exhibit 2: Vienna Metro

Exiting I-66 to pull into the Vienna Metro station:

At 6:22:29, the bus was in a 3-way-stop traffic pattern at the Metro station (note how I was so violently pitched forward and backward). About 6:22:42, the bus made its final acceleration before letting the speed bleed off, coasting into its spot at the station.

Note: I originally posted this at livandan.com

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