Gecko Tribe, LLC

Part-Time Technical Support Contractor Application

Work at home answering technical support questions via our forum, and eventually via our online helpdesk. Set your own hours. No telephone work.
Date Posted: August 1, 2007
Start Date: As soon as I find the right applicant

Job Description:
  • Initially, you'll help me answer questions in the CaRP forum. In the future, you'll also be answering help desk tickets. If you don't already have CaRP, you may wish to download the free version to get familiar with it.
  • If you're familiar with Grouper and/or Tetra, you'll answer questions for them too.
  • Later, you may also:
    • keep the forum clear of spam.
    • approve RSS feed submissions to http://chordata.info.
  • In general, you'll be expected to work five days per week. You may work six days per week if you wish. Except in the case of actual emergencies (which I may handle myself if they arise), work is not to be done on Sundays.
  • You'll set your own daily schedule, and time off is very flexible, as long as it's not excessive and the work gets done.
  • The job will not require a full-time commitment, but the number of hours required is not known -- honestly, I haven't measured how much time it takes me. At present, I wouldn't expect more than two hours would be needed on most days.
  • You will be an independant contractor.
  • I hope to keep the same personnel fairly long term, but your contract will run on a month-to-month basis, at least initially.
  • You will be paid for the actual number of hours worked.
  • You will be paid twice each month.
 Qualifications:
  • Strong written English language skills
  • Reliability and honesty
  • The ability to answer questions about CaRP -- if you're not initially very familiar with CaRP, as long as you can find solutions in the online documentation or previous forum posts and apply them to the specific questions you're answering, that will be sufficient.
  • General familiarity with PHP
  • General familiarity with XML, and the RSS format in particular
  • General familiarity with CSS
Preferred:
  • Basic understanding of UNIX access permissions
  • Basic familiarity with JavaScript
Other Requirements:
  • Your own computer and internet connection
  • A computer (eg. a website) on which you can run CaRP to test solutions
Other Preferences:
  • A PayPal account is strongly preferred, but other payment methods will be considered if you are in a country where PayPal is not fully supported.
  • An RSS feed reader that can bookmark items and show a list of bookmarked items only or sort by bookmark status (I strongly recommend NetNewsWire on Mac OS . On Windows, FeedDemon is the best I've found, though I haven't tried other non-free feed readers)


Application:
Name
Email address
When will you be available to start working?
How many hours per week are you available (and wanting to work)?
How long (months/years) would you like to continue doing this work?
What is your hourly pay requirement in US dollars?
Where are you located?
Anti-spam field -- don't enter anything here
Please respond to the following questions as if they had been asked by a customer. Provide a solution to the problem and/or ask for additional information if the question doesn't describe the problem sufficiently.

It's okay to search the documentation or forum for answers. I'm less interested in knowing whether you already know all the answers than whether you can find the answers and communicate them well.
All the stories are displayed too close together -- how can I get space between them?
How do I get rid of the Slashdot logo and "Slashdot News for Nerds Stuff That Matters" at the top of the Slashdot feed?
When I try to display a feed, I just get a bunch of error messages -- how do I fix this?

[CaRP] Can't open cache file.
[CaRP] Unable to create/open RSS cache file.
[CaRP] Failed to open file: /www/carp/autocache/ba2ae2867aa1bde403e45894b2e34d8f
[CaRP] Can't open remote newsfeed.
My feed used to be working and I haven't changed anything, but now it says this:

[CaRP] XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 49
When I try to display my feed, CaRP says this:

[CaRP] XML error: Undeclared entity warning at line 380 - This appears to be an HTML webpage, not a feed.

I checked my feed in the feed validator, and it validates correctly.
I can't get images to show up in my eBay feeds. I have this code, but it doesn't work:

CarpConf('iorder', 'image,link,desc');
I can't get images to show up in my Yahoo image search feeds. I have this code, but it doesn't work:

CarpConf('iorder', 'image,link,desc');
I'm trying to delete CaRP, but I can't get rid fo the cache folders. What do I do?
CaRP is turning quote marks into question marks -- how can I make it display them correctly?
When I look at a feed in my feed reader, the description has HTML formatting in it like bold, italics, etc., but CaRP doesn't display any of the formatting. I'm using the default settings. Why doesn't CaRP display the formatting?
I'm trying to make links from the description open in a new window using the ReplaceText plugin, but it only works on some links. Here's my code. What's wrong?

CarpLoadPlugin('replacetext.php');
ReplaceTextConf(1, 'desc', 0, 'a href', 'a target="_blank" href');
Why are you the right person for this job?



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