Skyler Call

Unemployed? Looking for new career opportunities? In my opinion, passing out printed resumes is an old idea. Seth Godin put it well in his March 17, 2008 blog post entitled Why bother having a resume?.

What will any HR department find when they research you online? Is there enough positive content about you to prove who you are and what you have to offer? Is there any embarrassing or degrading content about you, perhaps even written by you, that can be easily uncovered? Are you even heard of in the online world?

Create a domain for yourself online. I recently updated my website with this idea in mind. A quick visit to my home page and you will see that in a very simple manner I show you who I am and provide you easy access to the best online content about me. One improvement to my own page I hope to make soon is to replace my photo with a new vocation specific photo. I picture a photo of myself sitting in front of my clean desk and large monitors with some code I have written shown on them behind me.

Free tools at your disposal:
• WordPress – This website is built on WordPress. I use it everywhere and continue to praise that it is the best blogging tool out there.
• FriendFeed – Get online and communicate with others in your field. Share your knowledge and expertise. Participating in an online community will help you stay up to date with the latest and provide opportunities for you to learn from others. FriendFeed is the best but you can use any online community to accomplish this. Subscribe to my feed at FriendFeed.com/skylercall.
• LinkedIn – Get away from that static, boring resume and begin building a rich, dynamic resume with LinkedIn. I believe they are still too new to have a major impact today but I see great potential. Link your account to those you have worked with to begin building your pool of references. If I could make one suggestion here it would be that you not sit around waiting for volunteers to write a reference for you. Write one about them first. Hopefully they will see the effort you put into building up and improving their LinkedIn profile and will return the favor. View my LinkedIn profile at LinkedIn.com/in/skylercall.

Purchasing a domain name and web hosting
I recommend purchasing your domain name and web hosting from 1and1.com. I have used them for years and am very happy with the service they provide. Feel free to contact me if you need help setting up an account with them or installing WordPress on your newly created account.

Personal websites I have helped organize or design (updated 8/17/2009)
Feel free to use these as examples when creating your own website.
• Mark Christiansen – markwc.com

FriendFeed currently supports 58 services to share. When I first saw the list I was amazed at the large quantity of options. After using FriendFeed for a few weeks I noticed that some were sharing their Amazon Wishlist. I don’t have an Amazon Wishlist myself but got the idea to share my ThinkGeek Wishlist. After a quick visit to FriendFeed’s Services page I discovered that ThinkGeek was not a supported service. Luckily ThinkGeek gives each wishlist an RSS feed. With that RSS feed from ThinkGeek I was able to use the Custom RSS/Atom service in FriendFeed to begin importing my ThinkGeek wishlist.

What other services do you use that aren’t officially supported by FriendFeed that you are able to import with the Custom RSS/Atom option?

Subscribe to my FriendFeed account at http://friendfeed.com/skylercall.

This month we met at a Fire Station in Provo. Below are some of the photos I took.

Below are some images I took at the Hill Air Force Base air show on June 6, 2009. The planes in the air are the United States Air Force Thunderbirds.

This image is looking out from inside a large cargo plane. Both the front and back ends of the plane have a large opening allowing vehicles to drive up in and be flown to another location.

I have no idea what this plane is called but thought the thrusters looked like something off a Star Wars movie.

My sister will be graduating from Lone Peak High School soon. I was asked to take photos to be used for her announcement. We had fun experimenting in a new location. See more pictures from this session at http://www.callstudios.com.

Expressions Dance Center invited me to take photos of their students during a dress rehearsal. Visit http://www.callstudios.com to see more.

This month we met at Pete’s studio, East Bay Studios, and took pictures together. I took these photos of my sister who I brought along to model for us.