First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link.

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.

The post Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken. first appeared on The Clever Shark.

1. I should update WordPress more frequently. Until yesterday I was using a version that apparently enabled a third-party to add a bunch of spammy text at the end of pages (the usual “buy meds quick” crap), so that my Google ads were all for shady online pharmacies.
2. Google Adsense. I’m not impressed, I’m really not. You have the option of blacklisting target sites in the Adsense interface, but that blacklist doesn’t seem to be in use at all, as ads for blacklisted sites still appear even though those sites have been on my blacklist for months. And it’s going to be a while before the damage is undone, so I’m afraid it’s Amazon ads for now.
3. Another weak point for Adsense and Google in general — it’s supposed to be able to identify SEO cheats like the “spam attack” on my site, and those certainly matter when it comes to page rank. However Google AdWords clearly makes a mint selling ads to companies that make products that are chiefly advertized through spam (like shady meds). How motivated is Google to identify such blatant gaming of their AdSense system? Not a hell of a lot, apparently. If anything by ignoring factors it is itself aware of Google seems to be encouraging site hijacks of that nature by making them profitable.
4. What’s more, Adsense’s byzantine generated links make it difficult to identify the site a Google ad links to. It’s important if you want to add a site to the blacklist that doesn’t work. But don’t click on your own ads because this will lead to your being kicked out of the program without notice, explanation, or any form of appeal.
5. Google Analytics. I am impressed by the data it provides, but I learned that it doesn’t work if you insert it into your code after the </body> tag. I really can’t blame anyone but myself for this goof. It’s a bit of an embarassing mistake to make, really… if you have WordPress, make sure you insert the script tags in the cshk_footer() function before closing the body tag! To paraphrase The Simpsons, “Don’t do what Tony Don’t does!”
6. Against all odds it appears I have some traffic! Yay!

The post Things I have learned recently… first appeared on The Clever Shark.