Ask HN: Rate my webapp, TrackMyCV.com
Hi there, I posted this on Reddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x2es/hi_reddit_my_employer_went_insolvent_yesterday_so/ but I'd love to know what you all think. Long story short I was made redundant yesterday so I went home and started coding TrackMyCV.com. In a nutshell it's pixel based tracking for CVs, so you can see how often your CV gets read and where the viewers are located. You can use it to split test your CV and find out which recruiters are working hardest to find you work. Any comments and feedback welcome, thanks!
19 comments
Saw this over at proggit, I'll cross-post my thoughts here too (edited because you answered some Q's over there):
* There's a delay, which may make someone think it's broken when first testing it (edit: you mentioned it's temporary, for load reasons)
* How's this jive with PDFs?
* Debugging was on and spitting php code (edit: fixed!)
* I love it that you do a registration, but then don't force me to go do the email verification dance. Thank you, sir.
* You should have an option for email notifications when your resume is hit, and also make sure you let them specify an alternative notification email address in case they'd like to drop in their phone's email-to-sms address. (edit: you said you would)
* The map is also a great idea.
* I also like that you've built in the capacity for adding multiple CV's under one user account. I'd definitely tag each CV I'd send out with it's own unique ID, so that I can see if it gets traction.
* Be sure to log hits from the same IP, as I'd want to know if a company (behind a NAT) is bouncing my CV around internally, or someone's coming back to it a few times in a day (edit: you mentioned that it does, with a 2min delay to prevent over-reporting).
* Obviously this has a lot of advertising potential (at least I see a lot of ads targeted at job seekers) but I also think it has some subscription potential. As an individual, I wouldn't pay for it, but I did work for a consultancy firm and I would have paid for a clean "Pro" interface for tracking all of the CVs we threw out to customers/leads. Stupid that we didn't.
This is a cool implementation of something that I (stupidly) never thought about doing myself, and you make it easier/better than rigging it up on my own. Certainly if someone doesn't have their own webserver w/ awstats. It's also very timely for me!
Props, especially if you did it in the time you say you did. And good luck on the job hunt.
* There's a delay, which may make someone think it's broken when first testing it (edit: you mentioned it's temporary, for load reasons)
* How's this jive with PDFs?
* Debugging was on and spitting php code (edit: fixed!)
* I love it that you do a registration, but then don't force me to go do the email verification dance. Thank you, sir.
* You should have an option for email notifications when your resume is hit, and also make sure you let them specify an alternative notification email address in case they'd like to drop in their phone's email-to-sms address. (edit: you said you would)
* The map is also a great idea.
* I also like that you've built in the capacity for adding multiple CV's under one user account. I'd definitely tag each CV I'd send out with it's own unique ID, so that I can see if it gets traction.
* Be sure to log hits from the same IP, as I'd want to know if a company (behind a NAT) is bouncing my CV around internally, or someone's coming back to it a few times in a day (edit: you mentioned that it does, with a 2min delay to prevent over-reporting).
* Obviously this has a lot of advertising potential (at least I see a lot of ads targeted at job seekers) but I also think it has some subscription potential. As an individual, I wouldn't pay for it, but I did work for a consultancy firm and I would have paid for a clean "Pro" interface for tracking all of the CVs we threw out to customers/leads. Stupid that we didn't.
This is a cool implementation of something that I (stupidly) never thought about doing myself, and you make it easier/better than rigging it up on my own. Certainly if someone doesn't have their own webserver w/ awstats. It's also very timely for me!
Props, especially if you did it in the time you say you did. And good luck on the job hunt.
He replied here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x2es/hi_reddit...
Thanks for your comments
* there's a 2hr reporting delay right now to help with the load
* I believe you can do this with PDF but I may be wrong, I'll test it later tonight.
* Yes I've added an Ask HN thread just now.
* I hate email validation, it's utterly pointless, hate password validation too!
* That's a good idea, i'll get onto that, thanks :)
* Thanks, when you have lots of viewings it groups them by area
* Yeah i think it'll be interesting to see how far CVs travel between businesses and split testing is a fun idea
* It holds unique IPs, but it also records how many times each visitor views each document (with a 2 minute delay to prevent over reporting)
Thanks for your comments
* there's a 2hr reporting delay right now to help with the load
* I believe you can do this with PDF but I may be wrong, I'll test it later tonight.
* Yes I've added an Ask HN thread just now.
* I hate email validation, it's utterly pointless, hate password validation too!
* That's a good idea, i'll get onto that, thanks :)
* Thanks, when you have lots of viewings it groups them by area
* Yeah i think it'll be interesting to see how far CVs travel between businesses and split testing is a fun idea
* It holds unique IPs, but it also records how many times each visitor views each document (with a 2 minute delay to prevent over reporting)
Apparently it is possible to do this with PDFs, see khoury's post on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x2es/hi_reddit...
You said on Reddit that you wrote in a code factory? you give it the DB and it spits out the code? What does that mean exactly?
I do my DB design first, set up all the fields and foreign keys. Then I connect my factory to this newly created database and the factory creates the application structure based on the relations etc. The factory then uses code templates to generate a fully functioning web app based on Yii (http://www.yiiframework.com) with MVC, unit and functional tests and most of the boring repetitve work done for you e.g CRUD, search, autocomplete, jqgrid data grids, search engine friendly urls etc. After that it's just a case of adding your business logic and customising the CSS. This is something I'll be releasing in future, probably a lot sooner now that i have more time on my hands
Wow, I've always thought about making something like that but always figured it would never work. That would be cool if you released it.
Or have you ever thought of selling it as an enterprise tool? 90% of what I've done at enterprise jobs was making CRUD pages for database tables.
Or have you ever thought of selling it as an enterprise tool? 90% of what I've done at enterprise jobs was making CRUD pages for database tables.
It's not perfect yet, i have to edit the code templates for every site i build, i'll probably have to write a simpler templating system before i can release it. The cool thing is it's almost a quine - I can make the factory generate it's own code :). I think the plan is to offer a basic free version and a paid version that will allow deeper customisation. At the moment it only supports mysql but thanks to Yii making mssql/oracle/postgres work shouldn't be hard. I'll be working on this this week, I'll let HN know how it progresses
I'd like to see the homepage show me why I'd use TrackMyCV.com rather than Google Analytics, or any other analytics tools out there with mature interfaces. I like the checkmark list, it really stands out, and I actually read each one! More visuals of what the product actually is would be nice as well.
I've added screen shots at http://trackmycv.com/site/tour I'll have to spend some more time on the copy, seems to take me longer than coding the site!
Hey, I like this idea!
Bug? Browser / Jquery problem? The instruction link for MS Word doesn't work. It seems to try and load /site/install/program/msword. That direct link throws an error. Since you turned off debugging messages I can't tell what else to do.. :)
Bug? Browser / Jquery problem? The instruction link for MS Word doesn't work. It seems to try and load /site/install/program/msword. That direct link throws an error. Since you turned off debugging messages I can't tell what else to do.. :)
Clickable link: http://trackmycv.com
That's a cool idea.
I agree. Using images to track site hits is a typical mobile sites trick, but this is a very interesting application. I wonder if you'll be able to collect a list of IP's of companies; so you can tell if someone from Yahoo! or Google or XYZ has accessed your resume.
yeah that'd be great, it'd have to earn enough to pay for the full GeoIP database though, it's running on the free one now
IP address geolocation SQL database:
http://ipinfodb.com/ip_database.php
>The SQL database behind ipinfodb.com is offered for free. We offer the database in different formats (SQL, CSV), city or country precision, 3 or 4 IP digits precision and data in single or multiple tables. Available information in the database : ISO country code, country name, FIPS region code, region name, city, zipcode, latitude, longitude and GMT/DST timezone. The database is updated during the first week of each month.
>The SQL database behind ipinfodb.com is offered for free. We offer the database in different formats (SQL, CSV), city or country precision, 3 or 4 IP digits precision and data in single or multiple tables. Available information in the database : ISO country code, country name, FIPS region code, region name, city, zipcode, latitude, longitude and GMT/DST timezone. The database is updated during the first week of each month.
thanks, I'll check that out!
Wait a minute, are you saying there's a database you can buy that tells you the IP addresses used by every company in the world? That's awesome.