beyond measure

Last month my friends and I had an idea of a website startup. I can’t share the details right now but it will be a free service website and I don’t know how to make money out of it yet. But that’s what makes it fun. Even if it’s not gonna be successful, what’s important is I tried and I learned from it. Anyway, my friends are gonna work with me on this, they liked the idea as well. One of the preliminary decisions was choosing the right platform for our current situation. Here are my thoughts and options:

• Ruby - Ruby on Rails — while this is what I wanted the most, it’s just not possible right now. We couldn’t find a hosting service that we can afford for this. And we’re all currently beginners on the language so we’d most probably be crawling all the time when working on the project.
• ASP.NET - ASP.NET MVC — this one looks really tasty as well. We have strong skills in ASP.Net development and some of us has already worked on the new MVC platform for ASP.Net but the general feedback is it just isn’t quite stable yet. For the hosting there shouldn’t have been a problem at the start cause we know of a hosting service that’s cheap enough for startup websites. Of course, it will be quite expensive if the site grows.
• Python - Django — I read a lot of recommendations about this one. The problem is I don’t know much about Python, much more on how to deploy one. I would
• PHP 5 — it’s going to have to be this one. PHP’s one of the easiest to deploy and from what I see is the cheapest in terms of hosting requirements. Also most of us already know PHP so there shouldn’t be any problem there. We’re choosing between Kohana or ZendFramework for the framework. It’s more fun to start the project from scratch but it’s gonna take longer to develop so I don’t think that’s gonna be one of our options.

Emurse is a free online service for creating and storing your resume on the web. For starters, the service allows you to fill up forms such as personal information, skills descriptions, work experiences, awards and honors, and education history. The data that you provide will then be automatically formatted to a resume design or template that you can choose from in their website. For the free service, there are 3 available templates. For paying users, I think there are about 10 templates that you can choose from.

So I whipped up my old resume, and copied and pasted some infos into Emurse. The data entry forms were superbly made using AJAX. It took me a minute or two to find the Save button, and a minute to realize that they were already saved on the fly. Cool. Almost everything is done in Javascript. Additional entry forms are created on the fly without refreshing the page. You can even add, remove, and re-order sections. I would have been finished in less than 10 minutes, if not for the evil perfectionist side in me. When you’re done filling up forms, clicking on the Design page will lead you to a preview of what your online resume will look like. Or if you want to change your template, you can do that as well.

Pretty much all data that you will need can be placed in your online resume. Here’s my online resume in Emurse. There’s also an option to save your resume into a Doc or PDF file and other formats. But I couldn’t get that to work though. All in all, Emurse is very easy to use and manage. Updating your resume could never be easier. No more formatting headaches in your word processor. And you can email it as a link to companies that you apply to. This ensures that they are getting your latest resume.

My only problems with Emurse is I couldn’t achieve the format of my online resume to what I have now. And I have specific data such as my projects experiences that I want to be more presentable and easier to read. For me, the projects experiences are the highlights of a developer’s resume. Maybe a good additional feature would be for users to create custom formats. XSLT? Nevertheless, I still recommend Emurse to everyone. There are still other useful features that the service provides. So check it out.