User-Friendly Tools for Building Your Online Portfolio

I'm reposting an interesting article I found.

by Heather Huhman


In today’s digital world, your job search has to be as much online as it is on paper. Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can help you establish your personal employment brand and connect with potential employers.

An online portfolio allows you to compile what makes you employable — it should include things like your resume, cover letter, references, certifications, transcripts and any examples of your work (including writing samples, press clips, artwork or lesson plans). Plus, you should include basic contact information, such as a phone number and email, and more modern information, like a Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, or Facebook URL. Put all of this into one online package that’s easy to browse and voilà — you have an online portfolio!

Here are five great options that can host your online portfolio. There’s a breakdown of each one, so you can pick which one works best for you and your career goals.

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1. WorkSimple

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Summary: WorkSimple is the first work portfolio that helps you manage your career and performance inside your organization. Users have endorsements, followers, goals and accomplishments, which can help you build your professional and social reputations. Set your professional focus, add your goals, and get recognition for your work.

Additionally, WorkSimple allows users to brand themselves by sharing goals and contributions with co-workers in real-time. Essentially, it’s a Facebook Timeline for professionals.

Best Feature: WorkSimple encourages you to set career focus and add “Social Goals” that support your direction, which help you keep track of your accomplishments, efforts and successes as you build your reputation. Plus, you can get great feedback from co-workers.

What Needs Work: Those looking for a traditional portfolio to display resume, work samples and more may not find these features in WorkSimple.

Ideal User: A corporate worker who is tech-savvy and wants to establish goals and stay synced with co-workers. Like the other portfolio platforms, you can add images, but this portfolio is not solely image-based.

Cost: Free for an individual plan but pricing plans exist for team or company plans.

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2. Behance

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Summary: Behance is a platform for creative professionals to gain exposure and manage their careers. Users can create multimedia portfolios that showcase their work to millions of visitors.

Best Feature: Behance turns your work into an online gallery; It claims to get 15 times the traffic of all other leading portfolio sites combined (including Carbonmade, the next site on our list). Recruiters can find and track talent and post jobs for the creative professionals on the site.

What Needs Work: In order to have your own personal portfolio website, rather than just a profile on Behance, you need to join ProSite. This costs $11 a month, but it allows you to create a full website without coding, and it syncs with your Behance portfolio.

Ideal User: Any creative professional wishing to showcase multimedia projects — images, text, audio or video. The layout of the site is better for viewing visual projects, so anyone from graphic designers to photographers to industrial designers can benefit.

Cost: Free for a Behance profile, $11 a month for the ProSite.

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3. Carbonmade

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Summary: Carbonmade is an online portfolio platform that helps users show off their work — especially creative work like design, illustration and art.

Best Feature: Carbonmade makes portfolios easy. Users can create a profile in a snap, and the service offers tons of ways to personalize your portfolio. Plus, users can establish their own URL — for example, yourname.carbonmade.com.

What Needs Work: The site isn’t conducive to any text, audio or video work — a still image is best for this portfolio.

Ideal User: Again, this portfolio service is primarily for creative professionals. In comparison to Behance, Carbonmade seems even more geared toward visual art. Any professional who can share an image of their work — fashion designers, illustrators, architects and more — would find Carbonmade useful.

Cost: Free

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4. Pinterest

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Summary: Pinterest is basically an online pin-board. It’s primarily a social photo-sharing website where users can create separate boards for various things. For example, you could have a board for recipes, pictures of places you’d like to travel or, in this case, your professional creative work.

Best Feature: Pinterest is far more social than Behance or Carbonmade, so you can have eyes from all parts of the globe on your work. Plus, you can “pin” any image, and when users click on a pinned image, they’re redirected to the original website. For example, if you “pinned” a piece of your artwork from, say, your personal blog, you can attract more traffic to your blog.

What Needs Work: The platform was not made to be a professional portfolio site. Therefore, the site may have a different audience of viewers than an actual portfolio platform. Plus, like Carbonmade, text or audio works cannot be “pinned.”

Ideal User: Pinterest only allows photos or videos (which will be “pinned” as a still picture), so creative professionals with image-based work will find this site most useful. Any professional with visual work that can be put into image form can display their portfolio on Pinterest.

Cost: Free, but you do need to request an invite.

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5. Dribbble

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Summary: Dribbble is a “show and tell” for designers, where users can share small screenshots of their work.

Best Feature: The platform shows off your work with screenshots of your progress or completed project. Plus, it’s easy to browse other people’s work by tags or color.

What Needs Work: Dribbble isn’t useful for anyone with non-visual works; it’s really only conducive to visuals.

Ideal User: Anyone who creates visual work that can be shared via an image, especially graphic or web designers, illustrators and logo designers.

Cost: Free

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Conclusion

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All online portfolio platforms have their pros and cons, and different sites work better for varying types of professionals in myriad industries. There are many portfolio services to explore aside from the ones mentioned above, but what all of these sites have in common is that they allow professionals to display their work online and continue to build their personal brand.

Do you have an online portfolio? What service do you use? Let us know in the comments.

Free Tools for Creating Simple Websites & Webpages

Wix is a free service for creating and hosting beautiful websites. Wix recently announced that their templates and the websites you build with them are now available in HTML5.

Whatfolio is a free service for creating online displays of your digital works. Whatfolio is essentially a homepage to show off what you have created or what you can do. Whatfolio pages are highly customizable for a variety of purposes. When you create your Whatfolio pages you can choose from thirty templates. You'll find templates for photographers, designers, personal websites, business websites, student work samples, and many other showcase purposes.

Weebly is very intuitive and feature rich platform for creating a free website. If you're looking for a tool for students to use to create websites of their own, Weebly for Education is a good resource.Weebly for Education includes all of the intuitive website-building and blogging tools found on Weebly plus features built specifically for education. Weebly for Education offers bulk creation of student accounts which teachers can manage and moderate. Students can create their own websites and blogs using the accounts that you create for them.

Webs has all of the characteristics that you would expect to find in a free website platform. Websites built using Webs can include videos, calendars, polls, and a wide variety of third party widgets. Webs offers a wide variety templates and layouts to select from. For people with a higher level of comfort with technology, Webs might be a little too basic for your needs.

Yola offers a great selection of templates and customizations. Yola provides good tutorials and forums for first time users.

If you already have a Google Account,Google Sites is already available to you. Just select it from the menu of services that you're not using. Google offers a wide variety of templates that you can use and customize on your site. Should you decide at a later date that you want to add other contributors to your site, you can do so with just a couple of clicks in the sharing menu.

School Rack offers a free service for teachers to build and host their own classroom websites. Unlike other free website solutions that are targeted toward a general audience, School Rack has features designed specifically for teachers. For example, on your School Rack website you can post assignments with full descriptions, expectations, and deadlines. This is an integrated feature, not an add-on page that you have to create yourself. School Rack offers students and parents free accounts to communicate with teachers. Once your students and parents have activated their accounts, you can directly message individuals or send messages to groups that you have created.

Web Node is a simple way to build a website. The easy to use, drag and drop, interface makes it easy to change the look and feel of your website. For two reasons Web Node is a good tool for students to use to present and share their work with a wider audience. First, Web Node does not put any advertising on your website. And second, the user interface is intuitive enough for first-time users to navigate on their own.

Smore is a service for quickly creating great-looking webpages. Smore markets itself as a service for creating online flyers, but it's a little bit more than that. To me "flyer" implies that you're creating a single-use PDF and posting it online. Smore's flyers are dynamic and changeable, they're not single-use PDFs. Your Smore flyers can include many types of media including videos. Deleting or adding elements to your Smore flyer is as simple as dragging and dropping them on or off your page.

Check This is a service for quickly building and publishing webpages. Check This falls somewhere between having nothing on the web and a blog. Check This isn't designed to replace your favorite blog or website creation platform, rather it is designed to fill the niche for people who desire to publish a simple announcement page. Without registering you can add text, images, and videos to your Check This page in a matter of seconds. And after you have published your page you can go back and edit it by using the unique edit link sent to the email address you provide in the step between creation and publishing.

Page O Rama is a free service for quickly creating stand alone webpages. Creating a webpage with Page O Rama is very simple. Just visit the Page O Rama homepage, select a web address, title your page, and start typing. Page O Rama offers a good selection of text editing tools including page breaks. If you want to, you can add images to your Page O Rama pages too.

The Rise and Fall of Online Empires

CenturyLinkQuote.com put together an infographic illustrating The Rise and Fall of Online Empires such as AOL, AltaVista, MySpace, Facebook, etc. ranging from 1991 to the present.

Click here for website & larger image

How to download eBooks to your Kindle

We've just created a new flyer for our Kindle users! Here's how to download MediaOnDemand eBooks from the library to your kindle wirelessly!

Download the PDF of the guide here

If you have any questions, you can always call us up, or attend one of our eReaders made Easy programs! The next one is Monday, April 30th from 7-8:30pm!

10 Google Search Tricks You Might Not Know About

1. Boolean Search Parameters

To really master the art of Google search, you can follow certain terms and tricks. For instance, rather than simply asking Google a question in the search box, include specific items such as type of file or title name.

2. Public Data

Google has an entire directory of public data, which you can also access to look up trends. Type keywords such as "population" or "unemployment," followed by a state or county.

3. Easter Eggs

Google's developers have a sense of humor -- just type in "do a barrel roll" or "let it snow" to see for yourself. There are a number of other hidden Easter eggs as well. If you use Google Chrome, the Easter eggs will work better.

4. Tracking a Package

If you have the tracking number for a FedEx, UPS or USPS package, type it into the search box and Google will provide you with quick updates on your package's status.

5. Calculator

Need a quick answer to a math problem? Enter the calculation into the search box.

6. Unit Conversions

Wondering how many milliliters are in one cup? Google has a built-in converter for different units of measurement, like height, weight and volume.

You can also do the same for currency conversions.

7. Sports Tracking

If you're on the go, but need a quick check on your favorite sports team, enter the team or league name into the search box.

8. Medication

Find brief summaries and descriptions for most generic and brand name prescription drugs in the U.S. by typing their names into the search box.

9. Flight Schedule

Whether you need to check the status on a U.S. flight or book a trip, there are a couple terms that can help you plan accordingly.

Enter the name of the airline and the flight number to check its status. To see schedules to or from specific locations, type in "flights from" or "flights to" along with the city or airport.

10. Sunrise and Sunset

Wondering when to catch a sunrise or sunset? If you type "sunrise" or "sunset" followed by the name of the city, Google's built-in feature counts down to the next occurrence.

Learn a new Language this Spring!

We've been updating our Programming books this Spring, drop on by and check out a book and learn a new programming language!!

PHP & MySQL: the missing manual
by Brett McLaughlin
[Click here to check in SWAN to see if it's onshelf]

Answers found here! If you can build websites with CSS and JavaScript this book takes you to the next level---creating dynamic, database-driven websites with PHP and MySQL. Learn how to build a database, manage your content, and interact with users through queries and web forms. With step-by-step tutorials, real-world examples, and jargon-free explanations, you'll soon discover the power of server-side programming.

Python Programming for the Absolute  Beginner
by Mike Dawson
[Click here to check in SWAN to see if it's onshelf]

If you are new to programming with Python and are looking for a solid introduction, this is the book for you. Developed by computer science instructors, books in the "for the absolute beginner" series teach the principles of programming through simple game creation. You will acquire the skills that you need for practical Python programming applications and will learn how these skills can be put to use in real-world scenarios. Throughout the chapters, you will find code samples that illustrate concepts presented. At the end of each chapter, you will find a complete game that demonstrates the key ideas in the chapter, a summary of the chapter, and a set of challenges that tests your newfound knowledge. By the time you finish this book, you'll be well versed in Python and be able to apply the basic programming principles you've learned to the next programming language you tackle.

Visual Basic in Easy Steps
by Mike McGrath
[Click here to check in SWAN to see if it's onshelf]

Provides information on using Visual Basic, covering such topics as setting properties, using controls, building an application, scripting, debugging, and creating a database.







Coming Soon in March/April

• C++, The Complete Reference (5th Edition) by Herbert Schildt
• Quick and Easy iPhone Programming by Bintu Harwani
• Beginning Programming with Java for Dummies by Barry Burd
• C++, A Beginners Guide by Herbert Schildt
• Head First C by David Griffiths
• Sam's Teach Yourself Objective-C in 24 Hours by Jesse Feiler

Cool Websites
Not sure which new language you'd like to learn, check out this cool website that lines up common syntax and groups languages! http://hyperpolyglot.org/

Now sure which language to start with? Check out this cool article (with an awesome graph) with the Top 10 Programming Languages!

Let us know -
   What programming language books do you want to see at the library?

10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha

You may have heard of Wolfram Alpha, which is a
computational knowledge engine.

Apple’s Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for 25% of its searches.

Comparisons

Enter two terms with a vs in between them and you’ll get a comparison.

For example, you could compare websites to see the differences in traffic

between them.

You can compare cities, books, foods and almost anything else
you can think of.

Nutrition Information

Enter a type of food and Wolfram Alpha will provide you with its

nutrition information. You don’t have to stop at one — enter multiple

types of food and Wolfram Alpha will compare them for you.

Complicated Math

Wolfram Alpha is ideal for the sort of math that Google’s calculator and

most other calculator websites will choke on. It even provides graphs.

Where Am I?

Ask where you are and Wolfram will use your IP address to track you down.

You can also enter an IP address into the box and Wolfram will track that IP

address down and tell you where it is.

Days Until Something

Want to know how many days are left until your birthday, favorite holiday

or any other date? Just ask for the days until a certain date.

Generate a Password

Wolfram Alpha can come up with a random password and estimate
how long it will take to crack. You can even tweak the rules used to
generate the password.

Am I Drunk?

Have you been drinking? Wolfram Alpha can estimate whether you
can legally drive home. Ask it if you’re drunk and you’ll get a form
asking for more information.

Provide the information and Wolfram will estimate whether you should drive

home, call a cab or wait. You can even consult the little graph to see when

you’ll be within the legal blood-alcohol limit.

How Common is Your Name?

Enter a name and you can see how common it is, complete with a graph

showing you how popular the name has been over time. Enter multiple

names and Wolfram will compare how common they are.

Body Mass Index

Type body mass index (BMI) and Wolfram will present you with another form.

After you provide your weight and height, Wolfram Alpha will calculate

your BMI and tell you whether you’re within the normal range.

Word Trivia

Want to find words that begin with a certain letter, end with a certain

combination of letters — or both? Just ask Wolfram Alpha in plain English.

This is just scratching the surface of what Wolfram Alpha can do.

Plug in anything you’re curious about and see what happens.

Click Here to Take a Tour