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Monday, October 1, 2012

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five Minutes

October 1st, 2012Top Story

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five Minutes

By Adam Dachis

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five MinutesClick to view Building and designing your resume takes a lot of time and effort whether you're considering design or not. To help you out, we put together a resume script that's as simple as filling out a form. It'll take you five minutes and you'll have a properly organized, well-designed online resume that you can email or print.

We've posted a ton of advice about resumes, and much of it comes down to a few core principles:

  1. Be concise and leave out unimportant details.
  2. Be specific and tailor your resume for the job you're applying for.
  3. Avoid bland phrases, redundant statements, and annoying terms.
  4. Utilize basic design principles to make your resume clean, organized, easy to read, and attractive.

Even when boiled down, following those principles require a lot of forethought, organization, editing, and design ability. You just want a chance to prove yourself in an interview, not spend several days tailoring your resume to absolute perfection. While we can't help you with every last detail, we can offer you a script that organizes your work history, education, skills, and other data into one simple format that's easy to read and highlights the most important details. If you've got an old resume to work from, it won't take more than a few minutes to set up.

What You'll Need

Once you've got everything together, watch the video above or read the following steps to set everything up.

Step One: Enter Your Information

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five MinutesTo set up the resume script, you need to enter a bunch of information into the config file (called config.php). Find it in the script folder you downloaded, and open it in any plain text editor. It's very important that you use a plain text editor or you can mess things up.

Another very important rule: When you input information into the script, it'll be surrounded by single quotes (e.g. 'some info about my previous job'). The single quotes tell the script that all the text inside of them is a single entity. If you use another single quote or apostrophe in your text, the script may get confused. To prevent this problem, add a \ before any single quotes. Here's an example:

  Here\'s an example.  

With that in mind, read on to learn how to set up each individual section. The setup process involves editing code, but don't worry—you don't need to know how to write code to do it.

Personal Information

Let's start with your basic information. When you open the config file, you'll find the section already filled out with sample data:

    $personal['first_name'] = 'Life';
$personal['last_name'] = 'Hacker';
$personal['phone_number'] = '(323) 555-4444';
$personal['email_address'] = 'lifehacker@lifehacker.com';

Chances are you can guess what you need to edit. For instance, you'll notice a variable called $personal['first_name'] at the top. The word Life sits beside it. This tells the script that your first name is Life. On the next line, you'll see the same thing with the last name Hacker. Start by changing these variables to your actual name. For example, Bill Murray would do this:

  $personal['first_name'] = 'Bill';
$personal['last_name'] = 'Murray';

Pretty easy, right? The same goes for your phone number and email address with one key difference: the script doesn't require this data. If you don't want to share either piece of information, just delete these lines. The script will adapt accordingly.

Once you've finished with these four variables, you've completed the first section. The remaining sections take little more effort to complete.

Social Media Pages

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five MinutesIf you have a Twitter account or Facebook page that you want to include on your resume, you can add them here. In fact, it doesn't matter what kind of account you want to add so long as you have a URL. You can make as many social media entries as you like. The script comes with three pre-defined:

  $social_media = array('Facebook', 'http://facebook.com/you');
$social_media = array('Twitter', 'http://twitter.com/you');
$social_media = array('LinkedIn', 'http://linkedin.com/you');

If you don't want any of these, just delete them. If you want more, add another line and edit the data. It works like this: the only items you need to change come after the array( portion of each line. You'll notice that in the example the first part is Facebook and the second part is the URL. The first part defines the social media service and the second part defines the location of your page. Add as many or few services as you like. The script will take care of the rest.

Work History

Your job experience holds the most important spot on your resume. The script allows you to add as many jobs as desired, but we recommend sticking to the three most relevant. The config file already displays three placeholders that you can edit. The first one looks like this:

  $work_history = array('Time Period',
'Job Title',
'Company',
'Job Description');

An entry in the work history section appears more complicated than any other section, but hardly differs at all. It simply requires a little more information. Looking at the example, you'll notice four sections:

  • Time Period: When you worked at the job. You can simply put the most recent year (e.g. "2012") or the range (e.g. "2010-2012").
  • Job Title: Your official job title (e.g. "SEO Engineer").
  • Company: The company you worked for (e.g. "Yahoo!").
  • Job Description: A description of your duties at this position in a couple of sentences.

Replace each item with your job information as outlined above. Once you've added your three jobs (give or take), your work history is complete.

Education

Setting up the education section only takes a moment unless you have several degrees. Most of us only need one or two entries in this section, but you can add more if you need them. The default entry in the config file looks like this:

  $education = array('School', 'Description');
$education = array('School', 'Description');

The default supplies you with two entries, so add or delete more as needed. To set up each entry, simply replace School with the name of the school you attended (e.g. "Clown College") and Description with a description of your degree and graduation year (e.g. "BFA in Extreme Clowning, Class of 2020").

Skills

Adding skills works in essentially the same way as adding your education—just replace a two items and you're ready to go. Here's what the default looks like:

  $skills = array('Type of Skill', 'List of Related Skills');
$skills = array('Type of Skill', 'List of Related Skills');

Change "Type of Skill" to the skill category you want (e.g. "Software") and "List of Related Skills" to the skills that fall into that category (e.g. "Proficient in Microsoft Paint, Minesweeper, and Solitaire").

Awards and Honors

By now you should expect that the Awards and Honors section works like many of the others that came before it. By default you start with three empty awards:

  $awards = array('Award Name', 'Description');
$awards = array('Award Name', 'Description');
$awards = array('Award Name', 'Description');

Simply change Award Name to the name of the award (e.g. "Advertising Gold Award" or "Published in the New Yorker") and Description to a little extra information about that award (e.g. "2010 TV Ads Under $50,000" or "Short story about the trials of Orthodox Jews in Arkansas, May 2016").

Settings

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five MinutesFinally, we have the settings section and it contains two things. First, you have the ability to turn off any section on your resume (except for your work history—that's kind of important):

  $settings['social_media'] = true;
$settings['education'] = true;
$settings['skills'] = true;
$settings['awards'] = true;

Setting any of those sections to false will cause them to disappear from the page. If you want to turn them on again, just reset them back to false. (Note: You do not need quotes around the words true and false, so don't worry about that.) In addition to enabling and disabling sections, you also have two other options:

  $settings['printable'] = true;
$settings['style'] = "dark";

The printable setting determines whether or not your page displays a "Print Me" link up top or not. Changing true to false will hide this option and displaying your contact information instead. The style setting allows you to change the look of your resume page. By default, it will appear with a dark gray background and blue and white type. This is the "dark" setting. If you change "dark" to "light" your page will display with a light gray background and red and gray text instead.

Step Two: Upload Your Resume

With the setup process complete, you need to put your resume online:

  • Open up your FTP client and log into your web hosting account.
  • Navigate to the directory on your web site where you want to display the resume page you just configured.
  • Upload all the files you downloaded, including the config.php you filled out, to that directory.

That's it! Your page is now live and you can send the link to any prospective employers.

Step Three (Optional): Print It Out

Roll Your Own Perfectly-Organized Printable Online Resume in Five MinutesSending a link to your resume offers a certain convenience, but sometimes you need to supply a printed copy. The resume script contains a separate print-friendly stylesheet so everything looks nice on a standard black-and-white page. To print it out, click the Print Me link on your resume page. If you disabled this feature, just choose Print from your web browser's File menu and the same printer-friendly styles will still be applied. Some browsers will add extra information, such as the page's URL and the date. If your browser does this, be sure to turn off this added information before printing.

That's all there is to it. We hope this script helps you put together a stylish resume much faster and you get that new job you really want. Good luck!

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Yes, Mitt Romney Is Getting a Raw Deal From the Press

October 1st, 2012Top Story

Yes, Mitt Romney Is Getting a Raw Deal From the Press

By John Cook

Yes, Mitt Romney Is Getting a Raw Deal From the PressFirst off—there is no such thing as "the media." The people and entities who shape our political coverage represent a fractured, disaggregated, chaotic mass of divergent agendas and interests. While they often display pack behavior, they do not operate as a coordinated monolith. But that doesn't mean they're being fair to Mitt Romney. They're not.

The New York Times' David Carr argues today that the "media bias" canard being trotted out by the Romney campaign is less relevant and accurate than ever: "Many Republicans see bias lurking in every live shot, but the growing hegemony of conservative voices makes manufacturing a partisan conspiracy a practical impossibility." This is true as far as it goes. Many of the reporters, producers, and editors managing coverage of the political campaign may be culturally or politically liberal, but their first allegiance isn't to the Revolution. It's to the Story. And the Story So Far of this campaign is that Romney is a hapless, robotic, buffoon who insists on repeatedly detonating his campaign in an escalating series of Inspector Clouseau disasters.

The press is doing to Romney the same thing it did to John Kerry, and to Al Gore before him: Covering him as a loser. A weird loser. A distant loser, who is "uncomfortable in his own skin" and "failing to connect" with "regular voters." The contempt and pity for him as a candidate is almost palpable, and each moment in the campaign is distorted imperceptibly, as if by magnetism, to reinforce the Romney caricature. This is how we got a flurry of stories, for instance, about how Romney doesn't know why airplane windows don't roll down. They were based on remarks Romney made after his wife's plane experienced an on-board fire: "When you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go, exactly, there's no - and you can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem."

There are two interpretations of that statement. One is that it was a little off-hand nonsensical joke unworthy of further comment. The other is that Romney is really weird and doesn't understand fundamental truths about aviation. To anyone reading or listening with a reasonable sense of detachment, it was quite obviously the former. But to too many reporters and producers—including people, like the Atlantic's James Fallows, who ought to know better—it became more fodder for the "Romney keeps screwing up" narrative. The Telegraph's lede for its story on the matter says all you really need to know: "Mr. Romney, who has a track record of verbal gaffes...."

Likewise, when Romney tried to get a crowd at a rally in Ohio add his running mate's name to a chant they had started—"Romney! Ryan!" instead of "Romney! Romney!"—even nominal Republican Joe Scarborough stubbornly misinterpreted it as a hamfisted attempt to change the chant from Ryan's name to his own. This is not because Joe Scarborough supports the candidacy of Barack Obama. It is because he supports the primacy of the Romney-is-a-Loser narrative, and wanted to hold up another shining example of that loser-dom for the rest of the political press to giggle at. Which they did, even though it was obviously based on a falsehood to anyone who took time to listen to the audio.

My favorite example of Romney's transformation into a Kerry figure is in this New York Times report from Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg, on the myriad challenges facing the candidate leading up to this week's debates. It ends with this exchange, from a pool reporter following the Romney campaign:

As Mr. Romney headed to an evening fund-raiser in West Palm Beach, Fla., a reporter asked if he would be campaigning more extensively.

"Ha, ha. We're in the stretch, aren't we?" Mr. Romney said before promptly changing the subject and pointing to the sky. "Look at those clouds. It's beautiful. Look at those things."

The line quickly became a gag—a pitiful loser ineffectually trying to distract a reporter from the question at hand by pointing at clouds. It perfectly summed up Romney's desperate cluelessness, and had the added bonus of featuring his stilted fake laugh—"ha, ha." (That laugh, by the way, has been repeatedly transcribed in news reports for no reason other than to make Romney seem wooden. Imagine if Obama's every "heh" or "uuuhh" made it into his quotes.) It also had nothing to do with anything. It's only value was as a gratuitous little grace note making Romney seem weird for the perfectly routine political maneuver of dodging a question.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love gratuitous little grace notes. And I loathe Mitt Romney. I want to see him defeated, and revel in mocking him for the empty plutocrat that he is. He is abundantly to blame for the caricature that has developed—he is the author of his own foolish words, and his refusal to lay out specific policies in the past two weeks has invited the feeding frenzy for anecdotes and vignettes that make him look bad. But John Kerry deserved better when he was relentlessly reduced to a wind-surfing, pussy-whipped flip-flopper by a vicious campaign press in 2004. And Al Gore deserved better when he was painted as a sighing, disingenuous, wannabe alpha male four years before that.

Those avatars, like Romney's, had elements of truth, of course. And they were fervently fomented by the Rove machine. But too many of the producers and reporters who covered those campaigns ultimately made no serious attempt to slice through easily established narrative to focus on the issues at stake. The 2000 and 2004 races were reduced to personality clashes—Bush the down-home, garrulous Christian versus Gore the professorial nob, and Bush the cowboy versus Kerry the Gaul. The 2008 race between McCain and Obama was a veritable policy forum by comparison. So far, 2012 is once again reverting to a cool-kid-versus-the-stiff template. And Romney is not the cool kid.

As we approach the debates, some are speculating that we've bottomed out on the Romney-is-weird narrative, and that the media's inherent desire for conflict will motivate them to resurrect Romney in an attempt to make it a race again. I'm dubious. It's hard to get out of the weirdo box. While the need for conflict is real, the tribal urge to kick the loser back down is extremely powerful. Kerry and Gore were never able to shake it off, and while those races went up and down in the polls, their portrayals were frustratingly constant. Can you imagine Romney—the one you see in political coverage—being portrayed as an emerging hero after the last two weeks? I can't.

So even if, as Jennifer Granholm is predicting, the punditocracy declares Romney the winner of the first debate, it won't be long before he says or does something that, if angled just so, feeds into loser narrative. And it won't be long before the political press stops resisting the urge to angle it just so, and everyone will be laughing at him again on Twitter. Stupid Romney, looking at clouds. Loser.

[Photos via Getty.]

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Pokémon Black and White 2: The Kotaku Review

October 1st, 2012Top Story

Pokémon Black and White 2: The Kotaku Review

By Mike Fahey

Pokémon Black and White 2: The Kotaku ReviewIt's four o'clock in the morning and I'm sitting outside my apartment chain-smoking cigarettes, mildly buzzed on cough syrup and decidedly not getting the rest I was supposed to be getting in order to alleviate the need for prescription medication in the first place. Instead I am grinding levels on my water and fighting-type Pokémon so I can get past the rock gym leader in Pokémon Black 2.

Dammit, Game Freak, I'm nearly 40 years old. Knock it off.

I've been here before, and I don't just mean the Unova region, the setting for the first numbered sequels in the history of the Pokémon series proper. I mean sitting in the dark, ignoring my desperate need for a good night's rest in order to fill a Pokedex with imaginary creatures. It was back in 2000 with Pokémon Yellow, my first foray into catching them all.

I've played each iteration of Pokémon since and enjoyed them, but I've never felt the level of obsession I did that first time. Pokémon Black and White 2 comes pretty damn close.

Pokémon Black and White 2: The Kotaku Review
WHY: Because you have to catch all the things, and revisiting old friends and exploring the aftermath of events two years prior is an entertaining way to do it.

Pokémon Black and White 2

Developer: Game Freak
Platforms: 3DS / DSi (played on 3DS XL)
Released: October 7

Type of game: Turn-Based RPG

What I played: Played Black for 20 hours. Collected 7 of 8 gym badges. Seen 161 Pokémon, collected 51. Defeated my Pokémon White-playing wife in several rounds of local multiplayer. Utilized Pokémon Dream Radar app on the 3DS to capture items and Pokémon. Grinded like hell at every given opportunity.

My Two Favorite Things

  • Between filling out the 300 creature Pokedex to grabbing each of the game's 200 medals there's a tremendous amount of content for the collection-minded gamer.
  • Discovering how the past two years have treated familiar faces and places.

My Two Least-Favorite Things

  • It's been 14 years, surely we can make these battles more dynamic.
  • I lost my Black and White save and couldn't access the nifty flashback feature.

Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes

  • "Just when I thought I was done with all the catching." - Squirtle Fahey, Kotaku.com
  • "Where the hell is Squirtle, anyway?" - Muk Fahey, Kotaku.com

Picking up two years after the events in Pokémon Black and White, Version 2 sees the player stepping into the shoes of the latest in a long line girls and boys setting off on the path to becoming a Pokémon master. Recruited by a professor, introduced to a rival (though more a companion this time out, probably shouldn't have given him such a horrible name) and thrust out into a wild world where horrific creatures easily capable of slaughtering a lone teenager have somehow conditioned themselves to only attack other horrific creatures. A world where a criminal organization called Team Plasma — an organization with seemingly unlimited resources at its disposal and an evil plan to take over the world — can be brought down by a kid with a bandoleer of monster balls.

It's a silly place, but a familiar one, filled with characters and locations from the previous pair of titles. One of the rival characters is now a gym leader; the other a research assistant for Professor Juniper. Towns visited two years ago receive cosmetic changes to reflect the passage of time. The Pokémon gyms (except the first one) have all received visits from the unnecessary gimmick fairy.

By tweaking the existing setting rather than design an entirely new one, Game Freak has crafted an intriguing journey for those who played the original Black and White. The plot might be nothing more than a flimsy attempt to distract us from our extended game of rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock-Zoroark, but hey, did you see what they did to Nimbasa City?

Various diversions threaten to veer the player off the path to being crowned king of the pocket monster people. There's a movie studio where battles are morphed into cheesy action movies, though there doesn't seem to be much substance there. Pokémon can once again be decked out in silly costumes, collecting bits and bobs from about the region to create the ultimate ensemble for the game's version of musical theater. The player character, quite out of the blue, is given an entire shopping mall to populate and manage, one of the game's more interesting side activities. And for those that would rather compete than collect there is no shortage of tournaments to participate in, with downloadable content aplenty on the way.

I, however, am a connoisseur of the core Pokémon experience — the hunting and trapping of beasts, cultivating the perfect party and then wandering back and forth through the tall grass, harvesting experience points until my Pokémon are powerful enough to move on to the next area. It's like a Japanese role-playing game, only instead of five or six characters you have several hundred and not one of them has amnesia (not technically true).

Click to view While the element grid has expanded and the cast of creatures doubled, Game Freak has stuck to the same simple formula for 16 years, and for good reason: it's perfect. Grinding random field fights to level up a new addition to your party; battling an unfamiliar Pokémon to sliver of health and reaching into your ball sack; to hear the lamentations of your enemies as they faint following a super-effective attack — this is what is best in life.

What really gets me about Black and White 2 — what keeps me up at night — is the collecting. It's the 200 medals (achievements) attainable for completing specific tasks. It's the 300 Pokémon I must enslave to my will.

Mostly it's the damn Pokedex.

It's a silly little thing, really. As you encounter and collect Pokémon in any given habitat, they show up in that habitat's entry in the Pokedex. Once you've captured every Pokémon in a given habitat you get a completion stamp.

*twitch*

How can a man possibly sleep when he hasn't captured a Koffing in the Virbank Complex? How can I save my game without the completion stamp for Route 20? Where the hell is Dunsparce!? This game has upgraded my mild OCD to flamin' hot Cajun spice OCD.

That obsessive compulsion is what defines the Pokémon series. It's right there in the tagline: "Gotta Catch 'Em All". It kept me playing into the wee hours of the morning when I was a much younger man. It drove me to acquire each iteration of the game since, hoping to rekindle that manic motivation. I've found it again in Pokémon Black and White 2.

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