So I was looking through all of my various online web stats, starting with Google Adsense (conclusions so far: pointless on this blog, making a small amount on other sites). Then on to actual web server stats...
So on my main domain, the main search terms sending people to me?
I just wonder whether there's any cross-over between those two groups!
Do I look like a construction industry recruitment specialist?
No?
Well stop sending me your CVs.
Further to my earlier email concerning the above, I attach my CV for your evaluation. I have five years East Africa experience and several years experience with overseas water utilities. My experience has covered Zoning , Water meters, bye-laws , water legislation and related activities. I am currently in Thailand on holiday.I can be reached through this email. Regards,
or
Dear Mr.Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx,
I write in response to your recent advertisement for "chief operating officer" in Tanzania.
I would like to be considered for the employment and would welcome an early interview.
I have attached my recent c.v. and look forward to an early and favorable reply.
I wish to highlight my broad experience in Tanzania and Africa in general as seen in my c.v..
Thankful and grateful for your kind cooperation and response,hoping you would kindly consider my c.v. for any other position would fit me in future.
Thank you for your time.
Kind regards. (The above reproduced complete with all spelling and grammatical errors. "X"s inserted to protect the [mostly] innocent)
And quite a few more in the same vein.
After a little investigation found out that there is a company called Jared (nasty colour scheme, pointless Flash menu, massively invalid code). They publish some of their jobs on a site called "Careers in Construction", they even have their own special page, the problem is that page links to lots of pages full of jobs, many of which have the wrong contact details: remember "Jared" is only one letter different from "jard".
Well being the good netizen that I am, I've replied to each of the applicants letting them know about their mistakes, and sent a letter to one of the HR people asking them to update their contact details, but, given that this is the middle of a double bank holiday weekend (wahoo, four day weekend!) I'm expecting that I'll be receiving these until at least Wednesday.
Ho, hum, guess I'd better have ago at exercising Mozilla Mail's rules filters.
OK I've just spent the last few days converting jardBRAIN so that it can export an RSS feed. This involved rewriting and generalising some of the internals (which wasn't such a bad thing as I'd been meaning to do it myself for ages anyway, I just needed some external stimulus to give me a good reason, and a boot up the jacksie).
So all's going well, I settled on RSS version 2.0 in the end. Created a simple test template, looked everything up in the specs (RSS v2.0 spec) looked up things that aren't clear in the previous specs (even as far as going back to 1982's RFC822 to find the date/time format for various entries).
Unfortunately at the end of this I still have two questions about two ambiguous properties:
After a bit of research on the 'net there are three content types in common use for RSS files; text/html, text/xml and application/rss+xml. Of those the first is obviously wrong, the second type fits in a general sense, and the third seems right (and is recommended and used by Mark Pilgrim). So I think that I'll go for application/rss+xml, but that's still not quite settled yet.
The second question is still a little unclear, at least for a bear of little brain like myself.
From the RSS v2.0 official specification:
guid stands for globally unique identifier. It's a string that uniquely identifies the item. When present, an aggregator may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new.…
If the guid element has an attribute named "isPermaLink" with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the- element.
and:
A frequently asked question about guids is how do they compare to links. Aren't they the same thing? Yes, in some content systems, and no in others. In some systems, link is a permalink to a weblog item. However, in other systems, each item is a synopsis of a longer article, link points to the article, and guid is the permalink to the weblog entry. In all cases, it's recommended that you provide the guid, and if possible make it a permalink. This enables aggregators to not repeat items, even if there have been editing changes.
And from Userland's backend pages, Guids are not just for geeks anymore:
Aggregators and readers can use the guid in one or two ways:
1. To determine if an item is new or not, allowing the authors of weblogs to make minor editing changes without making all their readers figure out if a post is new or not.
2. If it's a permalink, make it easy for the reader to go directly to the item on the Web. This is cool for people who want to quickly include the link in their weblog.
The second feature is a nice convenience, the first, imho should be a feature of all aggregators, readers and content systems.
Ok, that's all well and good and I can see the reasoning behind it, people often take an existing entry, edit it to correct the spelling and then republish it to the same URL. My question is which way round does this work? Is the GUID there to always identify the one article through all of its changes, so that even if other things change, the GUID will stay the same (like my addeddate ID used in permalinks in jardBRAIN), or is it there to say that although this looks like the same article that was here ten minutes ago, its actually had the wording changed, and had some offensive phrase edited out, so the GUID changes (like my full recordid, or possibly something like an MD5 digest)?
Maybe I'm reading too much into all this, but I just can't get my head around this one.
Well haven't been here for a long time. Shows just how long I've been playing around with creating my own Blogging software for. Must get off my arse and actually finish it off sometime.
OK I did eventually manage to hack the Routefinder, but only through a weak password, and only after I didn't really need to anyway. So for a variety of reasons I'm not going to publish the details in public.
Must remember to jot down thoughts (roughly) when they occur to me and not months afterward.
Just got the test version of my Jard weather script showing actual weather conditions (albeit crudely) in addition to the bare temperature and wind strength/direction that it carried before. Must remember to convert the long list of "if... elsif... elsif... ...." to a far tidier hash based implementation once I can actually be arsed to type in (or copy-and-paste) the actual text for the decoded weather types.
