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!

After a long loyalty to Mootools I could no longer ignore the huge potential Ext holds for my projects. I think I held out for so long because I was comfortable with the Mootools style and didn’t really have “extra” time to learn a new library.

Much to my surprise, Ext wasn’t too hard to learn and they have a great cummunity that are eager to help newbies like me out.

So I set to work playing with the controls and documentation and came up with an Accordion plugin that you can implement in 1 line of code.

You can download the package (which contains the full, uncompressed source code) or view the live demo.

Ext.onReady is the starting point of every Ext project. All you have to do is drop the below line in onReady and you are set to go (well, you have to reference the library and create your markup too).

var nav = new Ext.plugins.Accordion({
	container: "navigation",
	panels: "panels",
	width: 200,
	height: 200
});

It’s been a little while since I posted an update on my Javascript API for Twitter. It has come together nicely and I hope to release the first beta within 30 days. that means at that time I will need many beta testers. If you are interested just leave a comment in this post with your email address or send me an email at aspnet_guy [at] yahoo [dot] ca.

I have made up the first draft of the API documentation you can view it here.

Here is a features list for the beta release. This list is semi-complete. Depending on how fast and well the beta testing goes there might be some late additions.

Features:

* Ability to specify location of server side page
* Ability to specify location of load indicator image
* Get user profile
* Get a single status
* Get public timeline
* Get friend timeline
* Get user timeline
* Custom ajax library

I have updated my API demo with the latest changes to my Twitter JavaScript API.

It now includes user timeline, friends timeline, public timeline, and user profile. I will creating the documentation soon and hopefully a simple website. I will also be looking for beta testers in the near future before the API can be released as 1.0.

I have begun building a javascript API for Twitter which takes advantage of Twitters RESTful web services. So far it only contains the methods to get the user timeline and a user’s profile but will be expanded a lot in the near future. I want to encapsulate every
part of the Twitter API with easy to implement JavaScript / AJAX methods for easily adding Twitter functionality to your websites and applications.

I have setup a simple demonstration to let you see just how easy it can be and the direction I hope to take this API.

This example is very simple and includes the following 2 files (besides obviously the API and a stylesheet).

twitter.html

<html>
<head>
	<title>Twitter JavaScript API</title>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/twitter.js"></script>
	<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="scripts/twitter.css"/>
</head>
<body>

	<div><strong>Latest Twitter</strong></div>

	<table>
		<tr>
			<td>

				<div id="twitter">
					<h3>My Twitters</h3>
				</div>

				<div id="speech">
					<img src="images/arr.gif" alt=""/>
				</div>

			</td>
			<td>

				<div id="profile">
					<img id="profile_image" alt=""/>
					<span id="screen_name"></span>
				</div>

				<div id="speech">
					<img src="images/arr2.gif" alt=""/>
				</div>

				<div id="twitter_limit"></div>

			</td>
		</tr>
	</table>

	<script type="text/javascript">
		Twitter.GetUserProfile("justin_");
		Twitter.UserTimeline({user:"justin_",update:"twitter"});
		Twitter.UserTimeline({user:"justin_",update:"twitter_limit",limit:true});
		document.getElementById("profile_image").src = Twitter.UserProfile.ImageUrl;
		document.getElementById("screen_name").innerHTML = Twitter.UserProfile.Name + " says";
	</script>

</body>
</html>

twitter.html makes the API calls which display the results.

twitter.php

<?php

	if(isset($_GET["user_timeline"])) {
		if(isset($_GET["count"])) {
			echo file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/{$_GET["user_timeline"]}.json?count={$_GET["count"]}");
		}
		else {
			echo file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/{$_GET["user_timeline"]}.json");
		}
	}

?>

twitter.php does the actual REST request and passes back the resulting JSON code.

As the API grows I will be blogging about it’s progress as well as releasing the code. For now you can access the code throught hte examples but I will have versioned releases and documentation in the near future. Any contribution would be welcomed.

Once this project is firmly established I hope to start a PHP API for Twitter also.