Here’s a quick, easy way to make your resume more appealing so it stands out in a crowd.
Vizualize.me is a free site that lets you connect your LinkedIn profile to an online graphic resume. In seconds, you can have a fun, colorful representation of your skills, experience and education, plus a handy list of your recommendations.
Watch the brief video to see how easy it is to make…
Take your job hunting or networking a step further by turning your Vizualize resume into a t-shirt for about thirty bucks. Clever, clever.
If you don’t own Adobe Acrobat (standard full version starts at $299), working with PDFs can be painful. I’ve written before about PDFescape, my all-time favorite PDF tool, which allows you to add comments to PDFs, actually fill out forms (even if forms aren’t enabled) and lets you do some modest editing.
With Adobe Reader’s new release, you can now add comments and share PDFs much easier (thank goodness!), so you might not need PDFescape as much as you used to, but they’ve included more features that I love.
In the year 2000, people sent about 12 million daily emails. In 2010, the number of emails per day is 247 billion — an increase of about 20,000%! If you want your email to be noticed in all that mess, you have to do something different.
Give Paperless Post a try. Sign up for an account and you get 25 free “stamps” that allow you to send a cool, attention-getting email as an invitation, announcement or thank you. Your recipient receives an elegant email with an envelope they click to open. The invitations themselves are fun to open, and they have tons of templates and realistic-looking textured papers that look as handsome as something you get in the mail.
Paperless Post is not free, and there are several things about the system and the pricing that have made me hesitate to recommend it for business use. First, it’s a clumsy way to manage contacts and responses. Second, all their little extras (like envelope liners and your logo) can really add up. But I just had a great response when I sent a promotion about my speaking services to my professional association contacts, so I thought I’d share.
I spent the last week on a writing retreat as I finished up the book on free and low-cost tools (coming this fall!). While I was writing away, I ran across this favorite of mine, and I realized I hadn’t shared it yet. Xpenser lets you text, call or email in your expenses while you’re on the road.
When you set up your account, you can set up the ways you want to be able to submit expenses. I can send them in via Jott, Twitter, email and more. You just send something like “Taxi 30 to airport” or something, and your expenses will be entered into your online account. Then you can download them in a number of formats to complete your expense reports. You can also take pictures of your receipts and email them to your Xpenser account for safe keeping.
This service is in beta, which means it’s still free. It won’t be for long.
Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.
But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.
WhatTheFont is a lot like one of my favorites, Identifont. This little free service allows you to upload a graphic that contains words, and the system does its best to identify your font.
I tried it with a few logos I’ve developed where I knew what the font was. It hit about 50 percent of the time, but the misses were darn close. I could have easily used one of the fonts they came up with as a close match to the look and feel.
WhatTheFont is a tool brought to you by MyFonts, which looks to be a pretty inexpensive way to purchase interesting fonts. Of course, I still prefer dafont, which is free. I’m funny like that.
Now here’s a switch… Penzu is an online blog-type service — that you can keep private! All the other blogs in the world are out there so you can share your thoughts, but Penzu lets you create a private journal for your eyes only, though you can choose to share with others.
I’m not sure what type of business application this might have, but I love the notebook-paper graphics. PC Magazine gave it props for being some of the best free software of 2009.
Favicons are those tiny graphics in the tabs when you open a webpage. If you don’t have one for your site, you’ll get a little blank page graphic, and that’s no longer the cool thing to do.
Favicon.ico Generator will help you generate the tiny 16×16 pixel graphic — upload a graphic or paint your own.
Not sure if this qualifies as a typical Cheapskate Freelancer post, but it is a tool, and it is free.
Paste text into this site to measure how fast you read and to improve your reading speed. You can modify how it clumps words, how many lines it shows at once and other little settings that help you work on your reading speed.
Worth a few minutes to determine how many words you read per minute, at least.
