James Cochran’s Blog

Recently my friend @JasonMRyan was talking to me about Firefox addons and I promised him I’d send him a few of my most favorite that I use daily at work. I’d like to share these with all of you to enjoy! Obviously I use a ton more but I’d say for work that these are tops.

Adblock Plus – Block ads (Like the one embedded below) :: http://bit.ly/ccB915

After the Deadline – Spelling and Grammar Checker :: http://bit.ly/9BslKE

FastestFox – Browse Faster – Scroll to next page :: http://bit.ly/bu2pRA

Readability – Cuts all the clutter out of a web page and gives you just content :: http://bit.ly/dsYSMr

Recently Google launched Google Profiles which will let you build a sort of online biography.  You tell them things like where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, and where you’ve went to school.  You can also list things like your interests and usernames on other accounts like Twitter for instance.

What’s interesting is even if you are not a heavy user of Google Applications this is something you still problably want to get in and complete.  Why?  Because someone, somewhere, sometime, is going to do a search for you.  Perhaps a potential employer.  It would be nice if you could control what information comes back at least on the first hit.  I tried it out and it was dead easy to get up and going and get some information put into it.

So waste no time!  Go to http://www.google.com/profiles now and login and start editing your profile.

I’ve decided to take the Facebook page for the CIT (Computer and Information Technology) department and spruce it up some.  I have a couple of ideas one of the main ones being that it needs to inform it’s followers of current events.  I’m hoping to find a way to pull in calendar items for the official CIT page into the Facebook page.  I’m open to any other ideas or suggestions so if you have a Facebook Page that you follow and think is great send me the link so I can steal borrow their ideas.  Just for posterity’s sake here is what the page looked like before I got my paws on it.

CIT's Facebook page

For many of us going through school now and soon to be embarking on our search for a career we’ve heard a lot about personal branding. Think about how Trump puts his name on everything. In essence that’s a personal brand. As it would apply to people like you and me it’s what we put out there on the internet. Our blog, our Facebook profile, and our twitter stream. This is our personal brand. This is what a potential employer would find out about us when doing a search to find out more about us.

So what is a Knog? It’s shorthand for Knowledge Blog. The idea being that you should create your own blog and talk about the stuff you know. If you’re good at fixing radiators on ’86 Chevy Cavaliers then talk about that. If you know how to install FreeNAS in a virtual machine using Virtual Box then you should talk about that. Anything in regards to what you are knowledgeable about should go in it. Anything you are learning you should document.

The point of this is not only will you be able to go back and review what you know and what you’ve learned, but you can also show it off to potential employers. The same ones that will be googling your name when you apply for that job you’re hoping to get will run across your knog and will not only get a sense of what you know but also your personality.

You don’t have to spend any money to get it going either. Just head over to WordPress.com and create a new blog. Try to use your name in your web address or at least make sure you brand your blog with your name so you show up in Google. That’s the easy part. The real work starts when you go to write your posts. Just keep at it and before you know it you’ll have more content then you could have ever imagined and you’ll be searching the internet trying to find out how to move your blog to your new domain “YourName.com”, which you can do fairly easily.  So quit wasting time and go to wordpress.com and get started on your own knog!