Hello, everyone!
As some of you would know, the start of this year I completed a project for my university work experience. This project was a website called CMeCV. The basic idea behind the site is to allow people to easily create a multimedia CV from their current CV/resume, videos, images and any other documents they may want to attach. The site also suggests relevant websites to link certain phrases to. As an example, for my CV it would suggest linking “University of Adelaide” to the University of Adelaide’s website.
Developing the website was really interesting. There were many problems and complexities that had to be resolved, or at least worked-around, during development. The biggest of these was probably the reading in, conversion, and writing out of CVs. For the most part, I left the reading and writing to external tools, which made things a little easier. However, the formats returned from these tools was painful to deal with. For example, the tool I found for writing out to a Word document fails at including hyperlinks within the document header and footer. The links end up being styled like a hyperlink, but they aren’t actually linked to their respective websites.
The whole front end of the website is developed using the Google Closure Tools (library, compiler, stylesheets). I feel these tools helped a fair bit with keeping the number of bugs in the front end down, since many of the major bugs would be caught by the compilers. That said, I still had to deal with a large number of visual bugs, most of the time caused by Internet Explorer. If there’s one thing I learnt from this project about cross-browser compatibility, it’s that you can actually make Internet Explorer behave nicely if you try hard enough.
At the writing of this post, a good friend of mine whom I’ve spoken about before is redesigning the theme for the site (with some help from me). It’s looking great with his changes so far (on the testing version we’ve got set up)! For those of you reading this at least a week after I post it, the theme may already be updated on the live site.
To those of you looking for jobs, or even if you’re just a little intrigued by what I’ve spoken about, I’d suggest trying out the site. It makes your CV/resume interactive, and interesting for potential employers. Plus, the first one you make is completely free (after that, you pay for “packs” of 3 CVs at a time). If you do try it out, let me know what you think of it in the comments below.
Thanks for reading this post.
Robert
