Awhile back on Profhacker, I posted suggestions for keeping up with job postings. But it was clear from the comments that keeping up with job applications is also on many people's minds.

We want to hear from you: how do you keep up with the status of your job applications? Do you use a spreadsheet, or some other type of software? Do you have follow-up reminders in place via a calendaring system? Let us know. We'll combine the suggestions into a later post.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user gabrielamadeus.]

Homemade granola is easy to make and an excellent option to keep on hand for quick breakfasts (or snacking!) You can serve it with milk or yogurt, or even bag some up to keep on hand in your office.

Below is a recipe for peanut butter and honey granola from the website The Kitchn, with an adjustment for baking time. I found that the granola takes much less time to bake than called for in the original recipe.

Please note that this recipe has lots of peanuts in it via peanut butter and roasted peanuts! If you or someone else who might be eating the granola has an allergy, you'll want to look to other recipes.

This recipe produces about eight cups of granola. It's very flexible; you can halve it easily, as well as leave out a few items if you don't have them on hand, such as the wheat germ, raw pumpkin seeds, and dried dates. Feel free to sub in quick cooking oats or light brown sugar ...

It's hard to believe, but even though we're just days into the Fall 2010 semester, job postings are going up for Spring 2011 and beyond (even 2011-2012 full-time postings!) Whether you're actually on the job market or just keeping an eye out on activity in your field (always a good idea), there are several tech-based ways to keep up with job postings. Not all job posts will appear through all of these methods. By diversifying the ways in which you keep up, you guarantee better coverage of the market and are more likely to see posts that interest you.

RSS feeds. Many job listing websites publish an RSS (really simple syndication) feed of updates. If you've got an RSS reader, adding the job site's feed to your list is a, well, really simple way of keeping up. Most feed readers also offer quick links for emailing feed items to yourself or a friend, which is a nice way to either archive...

Have you considered recording your lectures? Why would you want to do so? And if you do decide to record, how do you do it?

Recordings of your lectures can be used to improve your teaching, if you review the sound files later on. It can be less painful than watching video but still helpful. You might also post the recordings of your class to your CMS (course management system) for student reference. The recording of lectures also brings up some important intellectual property issues, as discussed in a recent Chronicle article. Some schools, such as UC Berkeley, have created detailed policies on the protection of faculty intellectual property in the classroom. Most have not, but by recording your lectures and editing them yourself, you can offer your students the benefits of student recordings while still having a say in what exactly gets pushed out to the masses. So if you do decide to ...

Academia is characterized by a myriad of financial arrangements. You might receive your paycheck every two weeks while your household bills are due every month, and two two-week periods do not usually line up with a month. Maybe you earn some consultant income every now and then. Perhaps you're a graduate student switching from an RA to a TA, each of which has a different pay schedule. Then there are of course bills to pay. Thankfully, there are a number of tools available to keep track of money coming in and going out of your personal accounts. This post will focus on digital tools, as opposed to pencil-and-paper methods.

I first started using personal finance software ten years ago as an undergraduate student who had a number of campus and summer jobs pooled together to help pay for my education. Back then the market was dominated by Microsoft Money, which I used and has since been...

How are you preparing for the upcoming fall semster?

Here's my checklist that I'm hoping to knock out before classes begin in two and a half weeks.

You'll notice that this list references several previous posts on ProfHacker.

1. Create a binder or a file folder to corral paper items that come up for each course. Usually at the end of the semester I digitize these, but it's helpful to have a place to pull them all together before archiving.
2. Set up computer file folders for each course. This fall, I'm using tips from Natalie's ProfHacker post on Organizing Your Teaching Materials.
3. Set up my course management system (CMS) for each course I'm teaching (and have a backup plan in mind in case it ever goes down).
4. Post the syllabus to each course in its CMS listing.
5. Post various surveys in my CMS. I do a getting-to-know you type survey, as well as the CLASS (Colorado Learning Attitudes...

You may know that you can use Gmail as email central for sending and receiving email from all your accounts, including your work-related .edu email. I personally love this option because it creates a personal archive of email that goes with you in case you change or add jobs. It also keeps me from having to log into different sites to manage my email.

However, I always felt as though one feature was missing: custom signatures. In my case, I don't want to use a signature for my personal email account, but I'd like to have one when I send email through Gmail in my academic persona. Using the Canned Responses feature in Gmail labs has been discussed before on ProfHacker as a solution. But for me it was a bit of a hassle to manually choose to add the signature every time I wanted to use it.

Somehow, Google always seems to come through with just the right addition to its services. The company...

[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's For Lunch?" — health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack. —Ed.]

Last week in our series, Billie introduced the slow cooker as an app of sorts for helping out with preparing food. This week I'd like to introduce another app: canning.

Canning is a term that describes a certain method of food preservation. Generally, foodstuffs are cooked and then processed in jars in a large bath of boiling water until a seal is set. For most folks it conjures up images up of their mothers or grandmothers spending hours over a hot stove cooking food and then boiling the jars in a large pot; in short: a lot of work.

However, I've found canning to be a useful process for batching food preservation in a way...

Last week I had the privilege of attending the 2010 New Faculty Workshop put on by the American Association of Physics Teachers, co-sponsored by the American Physical Society and the American Astronomical Society, and supported by the National Science Foundation. The term "new" is a bit of a misnomer because most of the faculty in attendance were "new-ish", having had at least a year of teaching experience. The meeting was chock-full of helpful information about issues specific to teaching physics, but there was also quite a bit of practical material that can apply to anyone in academia.

One of my favorite bits of advice came from Eric Mazur, who is best known in pedagogy circles for his book Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. His presentation included suggested methods for quantifying the effects of pedagogy implementation, such as concept inventories like the Force Concept Inventory...