Geek Daily

After my post on job search yesterday it has left few details on how to secure that job once you have found it and have a scheduled interview. In today’s post I’ll talk a bit about being prepared for that interview.

A job interview is the make or break factor in you getting a job. Sadly, you may be the right person for the job but if you can’t convey that to the interviewer then you are not going to get it. But how can you be ready for the interview. Easy. Practice.

I came across a great site that provides free employment and recruitment videos. They provide a wide range of video topics from education and careers to outsourcing and what it means to the economy. The topic that is relevant to this post is job interview videos.

Currently they have over 4500 videos on job interviews. There are some funny videos to keep things light but there is lots of great information there. They have videos of popular interview questions, how to negotiate your salary, there’s even videos of CIA job advertisements.

You will need to figure out what your weaknesses are when being interviewed. You can determine this by getting a friend to help you with a mock interview. It would be really helpful if that person was in the field you are applying for. Get your friend to prepare some industry specific questions that will likely be part of your real interview. You should also do some research to find out what common interview questions are.

Once you have pin pointed some of your weaknesses you can browse the interview videos to get tips and advice for improving those areas.

Just remember there is nothing worse than going into an interview without being prepared. You will certainly be caught off guard on some questions and that could really hurt your chances of getting the job.

Update: I mentioned that I would cover including your Ebay affiliate link in the feed in a later article, however, had I paid closer attention I would have seen that the affiliate link can easily be included when you create the feed.

Under advanced search go down to “Affiliate Tracking Information” and click show. Choose Commision Junction as the provider and enter your PID. That’s it know the feed links will include your affiliate id and you can get commissions on traffic you refer.

Have you ever wanted to add Ebay auctions to your website? Well, I’ll show you in a few easy steps how to do just that.

Getting started

Before we get into the real meat of this post we need to put some things in place. You will need the class file, which is below, and the url to the RSS feed you want to use. With these two things in place you will be able to add your feed in just four lines of code.

The RSS feed

Whenever you do a search on Ebay you are provided with an rss feed for that search. You will see the small orange RSS image after the search results in the Tools section. Here is an example of a seach RSS feed.

The class file

Save this file as EbayRssFeed.class.php and place it in the same directory as the php file you want to include the feed on.

<?php
	class EbayRssFeed {
		private $url;
		private $feed;

		public function __construct($url) {
			$this->url = $url;
			$this->feed = simplexml_load_file($url);
		}

		private function getItems() {
			return $this->feed->channel->item;
		}

		public function writeFeed() {
			$items = $this->getItems();
			echo "\n\n<!--EBAY RSS FEED-->\n";
			for($i=0;$i<count($items);$i++) {
				echo "<div class=\"EbayRssFeed\">\n\t<div class=\"EbayRssTitle\">" .
					"<a href=\"" . $items[$i]->link . "\">" . $items[$i]->title . "</a></div>" .
					"\n\t<div class=\"EbayRssDescription\">" . $items[$i]->description . "</div>\n</div>\n\n";
			}
			echo "<!--/EBAY RSS FEED-->\n\n";
		}
	}
?>

Adding the feed

Now that we have that out of the way let’s add that RSS feed.

First we will create the class instance.

//include the class file
require_once("EbayRssFeed.class.php");

//the url to our RSS feed
$file = 'http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?FeedName=SearchResults&siteId=0&language=en-US&output=RSS20&catref=C5&sacqy=&sacur=0&sorefinesearch=1&from=R14&fbd=1&saobfmts=exsif&_trksid=m37&dfsp=2&sacqyop=ge&saslc=0&floc=1&sabfmts=0&saprclo=250&saprchi=&saaff=afdefault&sabdlo=2&ftrv=1&sabdhi=&ftrt=1&fcl=3&frpp=50&afcj=&nojspr=y&satitle=vacation&afmp=&sacat=29578&saslop=1&fss=0';

//create the instance
$ebay = new EbayRssFeed($file);

Now, that wasn’t too hard was it?

Place the following code in your php page where you would like the feed to show.

<?= $ebay->writeFeed() ?>

Finishing up

Your done! That really is all there is to it. I plan on covering this in a later post and integrating your Ebay affiliate id so you can earn some cash from the users that are referred by your feed.

You can check out a demo that I made. Enjoy!