Tips for Getting Your Dream Job

Job advice and career research – 6 Killer tips for landing your dream job. As unattainable as a dream job might sound, with the right amount of forethought and preparation, you can make the move as well. Following are six tips to get you started.

dream-job - tips for getting dream job

Hotjobs has published some good job advice in their career articles section about landing your dream job:

Do you have a job that’s just like everyone else’s? Are you looking for a 9-to-5, but wish you weren’t? Do you wish there was another option, one that would lead to an exciting, unique, and fulfilling line of work?
I recently interviewed more than 100 people who currently hold their dream jobs as research for a new book called “How’d You Score That Gig?” These individuals, who are travel journalists, event planners, fashion designers, forensic scientists, interior decorators, Internet business owners and more, have one thing in common — persistence.

As unattainable as a dream job might sound, with the right amount of forethought and preparation, you can make the move as well. Following are six tips to get you started.

6 Tips for Landing Your Dream Job (image credit: Whiffleboy)

Combine Two WordPress RSS feed into a single Feed

If you have two blogs installed on same domain, you may want to combine two blogs feed into one blog feed. It will provide few benefits:

a) Ease of feed management

b) More readers

c) Better feed stats and much more

Required tools

=> MagpieRSS rss parser for php (download link)

=> FeedCreator lets you easily create RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0, ATOM 0.3 and OPML 1.0 feeds with PHP (download link).

Download required tools

Download required tools to your desktop and upload to your server in myfeed directory using ftp / sftp client. Following instructions assumes that you have a shell access to server:
mkdir myfeed
cd myfeed
wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/magpierss/magpierss-0.72.tar.gz
tar -zxvf magpierss-0.72.tar.gz
cp magpierss-0.72/*.inc .
mv magpierss-0.72/extlib/ .
rm -rf magpierss-0.72*
wget http://www.bitfolge.de/download/feedcreator_172.zip
unzip feedcreator_172.zip
rm *.zip *.txt

Create rss.php script

Now you have all required tools, just create rss.php script :

<?php
$TMP_ROOT = "/tmp";
$DOMAIN_NAME = "http://theos.in/";
$SITE_TITLE = "Your Site / blog Title";
$SITE_DESRIPTION = "Your Site / blog Description";
$SITE_AUTHOR = "Vivek";
$SITE_LOG_URL = $DOMAIN_NAME."logo.jpg";
$RSS_DIR = "/home/lighttpd/theos.in/http";
 
define('MAGPIE_DIR', $RSS_DIR.'/myfeed/');
define('MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR', $TMP_ROOT.'/rsscache');
 
/* include required files */
@require_once(MAGPIE_DIR.'rss_fetch.inc');
@include(MAGPIE_DIR.'feedcreator.class.php');
 
/* Set RSS properties */
$rss = new UniversalFeedCreator();
$rss->useCached();
$rss->title = $SITE_TITLE;
$rss->description = $SITE_DESRIPTION;
$rss->link = $DOMAIN_NAME;
$rss->syndicationURL = $DOMAIN_NAME."/rss/rss.php";
 
/* Set Image properties */
$image = new FeedImage();
$image->title = $SITE_TITLE. " Logo";
$image->url = $SITE_LOG_URL;
$image->link = $DOMAIN_NAME;
$image->description = "Feed provided by ". $SITE_TITLE. ". Click to visit.";
$rss->image = $image;
 
/**************************************************************
showSummery() - Fetch and build new feed
$url = Feed url
$num = Show the most recent posts (default = 10 )
$showfullfeed = true or false, for each article, show full text or summary (default false / summary text)
***************************************************************/
function showSummery($url,$num=10,$showfullfeed=false){
global $rss, $DOMAIN_NAME, $SITE_AUTHOR, $SITE_TITLE;
$num_items = $num;
@$rss1 = fetch_rss( $url );
if ( $rss1 )
{
        $items = array_slice($rss1->items, 0, $num_items);
        foreach ($items as $item)
        {
                $href = $item['link'];
                $title = $item['title'];
                if ( ! $showfullfeed ) {
                        $desc = $item['description'];
                }else{
                        $desc =  $item['content']['encoded'];
                }
                $desc .=  '<p>Copyright &copy; <a href="'.$DOMAIN_NAME.'">'.$SITE_TITLE.'</a>.  All Rights Reserved.</p>';
                $pdate = $item['pubdate'];
                $item = new FeedItem();
                $item->title = $title;
                $item->link = $href;
                $item->description = $desc;
                $item->date = $pdate;
                $item->source = $DOMAIN_NAME;
                $item->author = $SITE_AUTHOR;
                $rss->addItem($item);
        }
}
else
{
   echo "Error: Cannot fetch feed url - ".$url;
}
} // end showSummery()
//***************************************************************/
// Add your feed below:
// showSummery("http://path-to/url/feed",number-of-rss-items,false)
//****************************************************************/
showSummery("http://theos.in/feed/");
showSummery("https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/feed/");
showSummery("https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/feed/",5,false);
 
// get your news items from other feed and display back
$rss->saveFeed("RSS1.0", $TMP_ROOT."/rsscache/feed.xml");
?>

Customize script

Set temporary directory to cache rss feed, web server must be able to write to this directory.
$TMP_ROOT = "/tmp";
Set path to rss directory:
$RSS_DIR = "/home/lighttpd/theos.in/http";
Set your domain name, site title, description and author name:
$DOMAIN_NAME = "http://theos.in/";
$SITE_TITLE = "Your Site / blog Title";
$SITE_DESRIPTION = "Your Site / blog Description";
$SITE_AUTHOR = "Vivek";

Finally, set logo file name (replace logo.jpg with actual logo file name):
$SITE_LOG_URL = $DOMAIN_NAME."logo.jpg";

showSummery() function

showSummery($url,$num=10,$showfullfeed=false) fetch remote feed url and build new feed. It accept following arguments:

  • $url = Feed url
  • $num = Show the most recent posts (default = 10 )
  • $showfullfeed = true or false, for each article, show full text or summary (default false )

To combine two RSS feed http://theos.in/blog1/feed/ and http://theos.in/blog2/feed/, call showSummery():
showSummery("http://theos.in/blog1/feed/");
showSummery("http://theos.in/blog2/feed/");
showSummery("http://other-my-blog.com/feed/",5,true); // full feed

Test it

Open a web browser and type url http://your-domain.com/myfeed/rss.php

Download all files and required tools

=> You can download rss.php and required tools here (all GPL licensed except FeedCreator which is under LGPL)

Other tools – Yahoo Pipes

You can use 3rd party service such as Yahoo Pipes, which is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Personally, I like to keep more control on my feed, hence I wrote this script.

How to: Get Feedburner RSS Subscriber Count in plain text or html code with feed count plugin

Recently, I saw few site displaying their feedburner feed count using html / text code. After googling I came across very nice plugin called Feed Count:

Feed Count 1.2 is the latest version of WordPress Plugin that displays the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed in text. You don’t have to use the feedburner chicklet, This plugin can be easily integrated into your wordpress them.

=> Download and Installation instructions

How to: Find out domain expiration date

My friend recently lost her domain name as she forgot to renew it. Now there is no way she can get back the domain name. So how do you find out domain expiration date?

There are 3 simple ways:

By checking the public WHOIS database

Visit whois service here and enter your domain name. You can also use your domain registrar whois service to find out information.

By logging into your domain service providers account

Login to your domain registrar account and list expiring domain. Make sure you set all domains to auto renewal. Finally, make sure your credit card / payment information is upto date to avoid delays.

By using automated shell scripts for Linux /UNIX / Mac OS X

You can grab modified shell script that run as a cron job from your own Mac OS X / Unix computer. This script checks to see if a domain has expired. It can be run in interactive and batch mode, and provides facilities to alarm (email) if a domain is about to expire in advance.

Free Windows Software

If anyone has any information about free domain remainder utility for Windows XP / Vista, please add them in the comments.

Most domain register provides a series of reminder emails to you as the domain name approaches its expiry date. Make sure you whitelist those email address. If domain names are quite important register them for 5-10 years and lock all domain names.

Photography tips and demonstrations from Nikon professionals

Nikon is a Japanese company and famous for cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments etc. Now there is a Nikon Digital Learning Center which provides practical photography tips, demonstrations from Nikon professionals and industry experts, as well as other useful information as it relates to capturing the shot you really want.

Several of Nikon’s sponsored professional photography experts, including Rosanne Pennella and Cliff Mautner, as well as Nikon School instructors Reed Hoffman and Bill Durrence, will be dropping by this group (when not globetrotting on assignment) to post images, and provide tips and commentary ranging in topic from aperture, shutter speed, and composition — to specific genres like photojournalism, landscapes, and portraits.

Wow! this is a good news for all, if you like to learn photography from experts. Although I don’t have Nikon camera, I can still use the tips for my HP digital camera.

Flickr’s Nikon Digital Photography Learning Center

=> Visit Nikon Digital Learning Center online.

Howto create CSS Image Rollovers effect wihout using Javascript

Wow, this tutorial is pretty simple. I was looking for something like this for my small project. This CSS code gives the same effect as with a JavaScript rollover except users dont need JavaScript and you only have to load a single image.

I really hate having to use JavaScript for image rollovers as it seems messy, requires two separate images and can only degrade gracefully to nothing if the user has JavaScript turned off.

CSS Image Rollovers [redvodkajelly.com]

Compress a pdf file?

PDF (Portable Document Format ) format is already optimized and he de facto standard for document publishing on the internet and other media.

A PDF file is often a combination of vector graphics, text, and raster graphics. The basic types of content in a PDF are:

* text stored as such
* vector graphics for illustrations and designs that consist of shapes and lines
* raster graphics for photographs and other types of image

Because all graphics and other stuff PDF file is optimized. You can use program such as Winzip or 7-Zip (or command line utility winzip/zip) to package and compress a pdf file. My personal experience shows that you will not gain much benefit from compressing a PDF file as compression ratio is very small.

I’d be interested to hear if you have other software program to consider when compressing a PDF (remember it must provide a good compression).

What steps should be taken when upgrading an operating system from Windows 98 to Windows Vista / XP?

A friend of mine emailed me a question:

What steps should be taken when upgrading an operating system from Windows 98 to Windows XP?

The first and most important step is backup your data to Pen drive, DVD or external hard disk. You should backup
a] Your emails and settings
b] Your Browser bookmarks and settings
c] Your documents and other personal files

This step-by-step article describes how to prepare to upgrade from Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition to Microsoft Windows XP. The information in this article may be useful to help you avoid some common upgrade-related issues.

Read more: How to prepare to upgrade Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition to Windows XP

vBulletin forum change or edit subject titles for individual post

If you need to change post title login as admin or as mod, open individual thread. At the top of each thread, you will see thread tools

Task: vBulletin edit titles

a) Click on Thread tools

b) A small popup will open (see image below)

c) You will see the list of Moderation tool

d) Select Edit thread

vBulletin forum change or edit subject titles for individual post

e) Click on perform action

f) Now you can edit post title as follows:
vBulletin forum change title