Get a Job! … using Craigslist

Unless you have a permanent, full-time technical writing position at a stable company that is never going to downsize or go out of business, you need to constantly be on the lookout for job opportunities. If you're a freelancer, you already know this. Luckily, there are plenty of resources around to help you find jobs and/or contracts and/or assignments.

One of these is Craigslist. Craigslist is a free community-run classified advertisement service on the Internet, started in 1995 by a guy named – prepare yourself – Craig. It gets its money from for-pay help wanted and apartment ads: everything else is free.

To start using Craigslist, go to www.craigslist.org. Since Craigslist is organized geographically, you need to find the nearest included city (450 worldwide). Big cities are on the far right. Otherwise, click your state, and then click the nearest city in the list that appears.

Once you get to the right city, there are two areas to check for employment: "jobs" and "gigs". You'll notice that under "jobs" there's an entry for "writing/editing": they saw you coming. Click that entry, and you'll see a new page with recent listings, and a simple keyword search form. Just to see what a posted job ad looks like, click on any one. You'll notice that it includes a title, the date it was posted, a "job…@craigslist.org" email address, and a description. The email address is how you would inquire about a position, if the ad itself contains no contact information. At the bottom of the description, you'll see some mandatory Craigslist fields that indicate the job's location, whether it's okay to share the job with others, and so forth.

Now, you used to be able to subscribe to periodic emails from Craigslist that would keep you up to date on new jobs in this area. Unfortunately, that service has been suspended for a variety of reasons.

Instead, you can simply browse the ads, or set up searches for your particular areas of expertise.

What about "gigs"? Under "gigs", you'll see a "writing" entry, and the much-vaguer "creative" entry. Click "writing", and you'll see a list of possibilities that aren't exactly jobs. They may be contracts. They may be solicitations for fledgling magazines. They may be practically anything, and they sure are interesting!

Suggestion: If you want an actual job, peruse the "jobs" regularly. If you want to try something different, probably without pay, check out the "gigs" occasionally.

Good luck!

External Searching

In the last column, I discussed internal searches, that is, searching within a document for specific instances of text. Of sometimes greater importance are external searches, namely, searching through multiple files to find out which ones contain the desired text. External searching usually starts right after you say something like, "I know it's in one of these files, but I can't remember which one." Naturally, once you pinpoint which files have what you're looking for, then you can do internal searches on each one to zero in on the specific instance of the text.

On a Windows system, you have the option of using its built-in Search function, which you can access from any Windows Explorer window. If you know which directory (or folder) you want to search – including the entire drive – just right-click that item and hit E for Search (thanks for the easy mnemonic, Microsoft!). A Search Results box will pop up, and you can enter your search criteria, including filename wild cards (like *.doc if you know it's in a Word document), the specific text you're looking for, when it was modified, what size files to search, and so forth. Click Search, and the search starts, recursively looking in every sub-directory or sub-folder of your starting point. A list of files that match your criteria will appear, and you can then proceed from there.

This is a pretty fast and easy search function, and really, its only drawback is that it doesn't work very well. It typically won't find text in FrameMaker files or PDFs, for example. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. While such flexibility is admirable in people, it isn't in search utilities.

For this reason, I like to use a quick and dirty search tool that runs on – brace yourself – DOS. The utility is TS.EXE, part of the Norton Utilities collection of tools. This sucker is ancient, but it gets the job done thoroughly and even with a few bells and whistles. You run this from the DOS prompt (aka Command Prompt in the Windows Accessories folder), meaning you somehow need to navigate using the CD command to the folder you want to search in.

Once there, you can run TS (make sure it's in a directory on the default path, like the WINDOWS directory) with the "/?" option to get all its parameters. Here's a typical command I use:
TS *.fm "program manager" /s /a /log >> \output.doc
This command includes the wildcards for FrameMaker files (*.fm), the text to search for in quotes, a flag to search all subdirectories of the current directory (/s), another flag to automate the process (/a), and yet another flag to give output in a log type format (/log). The final mumbo jumbo (>> \output.doc) sends the output of this search to a file called output.doc in the root directory, which I can peruse at my leisure when the search is done.

TS will find all occurrences of the text string. I recommend it highly. The only problem is that you might not have a copy of this DOS utility lying around. Luckily, you can download it from a truly wonderful site (http://vetusware.com/download/Norton%20Utilities%208.0/?id=3515), which hosts abandoned software of all kinds, just so jackals like us can come along and use it.

How did I find this site? I searched for it, of course.

Internal Searching, Or I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

As technical writers, we often need to search for items to change or remove. There are really two kinds of searching: internal, meaning searching for something within a document; and external, meaning searching for something within multiple documents. With internal searching, we are trying to find the locations of the specific instances of the search item. With external searching, we are trying to find out which files contain the search item. This article will talk about internal searching.

Searching within a Word document is straightforward. You bring up the Find and Replace box, enter your search items, and click Find Next. The Word search tool doesn't have some of the bells and whistles of other search utilities, but it gets the job done. If your document happens to consist of a master document with sub-documents, expand the sub-documents before you start your search.

In contrast to the ease of searching within Word documents, searching within FrameMaker documents can be downright painful. I'm not talking about simple documents where everything is in a single file (although that can have its challenges also: make sure all conditional text is visible). I'm talking about the far more usual case of a book or document file that has text insets. FrameMaker does NOT search in text insets, even if the text in question is visible on the screen. It only searches in the open document itself.

This means that we have to get creative if we want to search in FrameMaker documents. "Creative", in this case, means sneaky. We can't search for what we want in FrameMaker. Therefore, we need to change the FrameMaker file into something that we can search thoroughly. We have several choices, including PDF and HTML.

If we transform the FrameMaker document into a PDF, we can open it with Acrobat and perform searches within Acrobat. When we find what we're looking for, we must then refer back to the original FrameMaker document to make any changes. The Acrobat search utility is fairly limited and can't do many of the kinds of searches we would like. However, we can go one further step and save the PDF as a TXT or Word file, then use Word – or some other search utility – to find what we want.

Does that seem absurdly roundabout? Well, you're right: it is. But that's what you have to resort to if the maker of the product *cough* Adobe *cough* doesn't see fit to include search tools that actually work with its document architecture.

I can't say that I recommend transforming the original FrameMaker document into HTML, for two reasons. First, the process creates a GIF file for every figure in your document, which is annoying. Second, once you have the HTML file, you have to use the search function of your browser to do your searches, and these are typically very limited.

Bottom line: to do thorough internal searches on FrameMaker documents with text insets, you're going to have to bite the bullet and transform the document into at least PDF, and possibly TXT or Word format first.