Over the weekend I created a short intro to put on the front of video pieces at The Telegram. It was my first foray into the world of After Effects and is based on a tutorial found at www.videocopilot.net. I still have to fine tune it a bit, add some music, play with the text and maybe shorten it a few seconds.
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Two days ago, Angela Grant wrote a post about her favorite job search tool, Indeed.com. Having been on the job hunt for some months myself (though no longer, I am happy to say), I thought I would share how I went about canvassing the job market.
Similar to Angela, I did make use of the advanced searches on Indeed. However, instead of signing up for email alerts, I subscribed to the RSS feed for that particular search. I repeated this process for searches on Journalism Jobs, Idealist.org, Craigslist and a few other job boards. I found this to be easier than email alerts because my inbox does not get cluttered with job alerts, and, using Google Reader, I was able to create a folder specifically for my job feeds that I could then search further by specific keywords (location, skills, etc).
Hopefully this helps you expand your job search and find the perfect job.
After playing around with Sprout more over the afternoon, I ran into some of its shortcomings. Then again, I am not sure anyone intended it for trying to create multimedia packages, only small widgets.
I ran into trouble when I wanted to use html within a text box (which has the option to include a scroll bar). Without being able to add html into the text box, I can’t add a collection of videos or photo galleries that users can scroll through.
Still, for the ease of use, I can imagine all sorts of uses for promotion of videos, galleries and special sections.
After reading about Sprout on the JACC Blog, I decided to give it a try and see what widgets I could create. At first I tried something very simple, a rss feed of the top stories from the Des Moines Register, sized to fit my sidebar (it’s on the right under my multimedia links).
But then, I realized that you could build separate pages withing each widget, opening up countless possibilities. You can also insert video and slideshows into these widgets. Here is my latest attempt, which combines four different feeds… The cool thing is that it can be embedded nearly anywhere, and includes easy buttons to allow users to put it in their facebook and myspace profiles, their blogger blog, and their igoogle page among many other places.
Just made another widget using their countdown tool. Did I mention you can also customize the size of the project, something I wish I could do in Vuvox, but perhaps I have found my answer here.
Next,
