Hey guys,

Here are some cool resumé ideas to get you going.

These three are actually just demo's of existing, built WordPress themes. I wouldn't use them myself (build your own!!) but they have good ideas design-wise:

http://www.elegantthemes.com/demo/?theme=MyResume
http://www.mojo-themes.com/item/aurel-resume-cv-premium-template/demo/
http://themeforest.net/item/precision-premium-vcard-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/1922457

These two really push the boundaries of what people consider "resumés":

http://phildub.com/?original=1
http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/

Remember, the only limitation of a resumé is that it needs to tell people about yourself! Don't let yourself get sucked into thinking you need to make it look like a traditional paper version. You're building a web site resumé - build a web site!

Class on Monday, Jan 15th.... The Online Resume...It's alive!

A word resume is handy to print out and hand to prospective employers, but the online resume is where everyone is looking.  The online resume is a great way to show, your skills as a web developer, while providing pertinent information about you.  It's important to describe your skills, but showing is even better.

Today we started the exercise of generating on online resume for you to keep and expand upon.  The resume is a great way to practice your HTML/CSS/Javascript/JQuery skills.  We decided on the spot to follow a similar format to one of our NWC instructors Kris Childs resume, as follows:

Header of Name and contact information centered on the browser, Name larger more standout font and contact info a little more subtle.  Informative sections with title and more info that expands and collapses.  The collapsing sections starts out hidden (css display:none) and when the title of the section is click by the mouse the information expands with a flowing jQuery expand (slideToggle()).  Sections we came up with were Summary, Technical Skills, Experience, Education, and Extra Curricular.

The class was very productive and all of you were able to get a layout started with functioning onclick events on the sections.  This shows that things are starting to sink in and you are becoming web developers.  To be able to put this together in an hour shows great progress.  Let's continue building on this foundation make a resume that pops and you are proud of.  Start digging into CSS styles that are beyond what we have shown you, and jQuery transitions.  Use Mother Google and get some tips with research (GTS).  Please post links to your plunk's so we can see progress as you add functionality.

Remember resumes need to be clear and concise, and an online resume needs to be attractive and show skills.  Employers want to know you have a clue and you can communicate, and this goes a long way to a second look.

Fun with Ajax and Flickr

Ever notice how sometimes a web page reloads and sometimes it doesn't after searching, submitting or other web-type functions?  The pages that don't reload and have more of the desktop application feel, use a technology called AJAX.  It stands for Asnychonous Javascript and XML, and it makes the Internet a much better place.

Today we are going to use AJAX to display some images from Flickr search.  Flickr provides a great API (Application Programming Interface) to access it's pictures and meta data about them.  We are going to use JQuery, and this URL to do most of the work:  http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tagmode=any&format=json&tags=mountains.

Before we get started, we need to talk briefly about cross site scripting attacks.  What ???  Who cares about those, we just want to display some images from Flickr.  Well, unfortunately, since hackers find it easy to launch these types of attacks against javascript, we have to jump through a few more hoops if we are going to make an AJAX request from the client side (from Javascript, rather than PHP, C#, etc..).  It turns out this type of request is a bit easier if you are doing it from the server side, but we can still get the results we want.

Here is the plunk from class this evening.  We will be expanding upon it in our remaining classes.