About

I registered this domain name some time ago, but I couldn't think of a good way to use it. I never really like the whole me@my-name.com email addresses either. Then while performing my annual updates to my resume, I had the idea to simply host my resume under the domain.

HR-XSL

In 2008, I finally decided to convert my resume to XML. I ran across the HR-XSL Project on Sourceforge. HR-XSL is a collection of XSLT Stylesheets that convert XML resumes to PDF, HTML, XHTML, WordML, Text, etc.

HR-XML

The XML resume in question must be shema-valid to the HR-XML standards. HR-XML covers a broad range of Human Resources documents. The schemas are very modular to make re-use of common elements. So if you don't see the documentation on a particular section of the Resume page, then chances are it's documented in a sub-schema.

docbook-xsl

HR XSL uses docbook as an intermediate format for just about all of the transformations except PDF, which uses XSL-FO. Once the resume is in a docbook format, the remainder of the work is done by an included project called docbook-xsl.

This Project

HR-XSL uses Ant as a build environment for performing the transformations. So I decided to take the HR-XSL package and turn it into an Eclipse project. Using the schemas from HR-XML and the examples included with HR-XSL, I started to move my resume into XML.

Once I finished updating my resume to XML, I started to try some of the supported transformations. The HTML and PDF looked particularly nice. I had some character encoding problems with the XHTML, but I was able work around them by forcing my output to ASCII instead of UTF-8. So much for the internationalization that HR-XSL supports. Text worked well too as soon as I installed lynx for Mac OS X.

I wasn't, however, able to get a good method for converting from docbook to WordML. HR-XSL comes with a set of stylesheets called roundtrip, which allow you convert from docbook to WordML and back again. I found that there is incomplete support for the docbook to WordML transformation. Additionally I wasn't too happy with default template used to stylize the WordML. If I get back to it, I might add in the missing XSL templates for the unsupported docbook tags and then mess around with the WordML template that controls formatting. For the while, I was opening the HTML in OpenOffice and exporting to .odt, as well as saving it as a .doc. That's not really in the spirit of the project, so I've dropped those versions altogher.

Building the Site

Once I was generating the different versions of my resume, I started to work them into this site. I grabbed a free web template and started to put the content in. I quickly realized that I didn't want highly personal information being harvested off of my page, so I wrote an XSLT that cuts the private information from my resume. I then use the resulting resume to generate the various versions, including a small PHP page that I simply include into the home page. This way the home page can have most of it's information be static, but then it can include the resume information into its body.

The purpose of a resume is usually to get a job, which meant that I'd need to be contacted. That was going to be hard to do since I took all of my contact information off of the site. I decided to put a contact form on the site, but to protect it with a captcha. I found a really nice library from Securimage; it even speaks the characters. I integrated it with a little AJAX so that the page wouldn't reload.

Questions

I'm certainly no expert on any of the topics here, but if you have questions that you think I can help with, feel free to contact me.