New York Times Features Elance and Odesk

In a society where people are losing their jobs, many have turned to self-employment. Companies who see outsourcing as a viable strategy for their business hire these independent contractors.

In today's New York Times, two communities that I'm part of were featured: Elance and Odesk. These were not the only ones, and the article says a lot about the growth in the freelance communities because of the economic crisis. To read the whole article, click here.

These are my profiles in Elance and Odesk, respectively:

My Elance
My Odesk

Elance Upgrade

I've been a member of Elance for about two months now. So far I only had one gig that lasted a month, with payment and positive feedback.

Today I saw their page containing a standby page which means that we can't access elance.com right now. They're apparently performing a redesign of their site to make it look better. I'm looking forward to the new features they're going to add. In this page they even sent a link to their Facebook profile.

If you want to check me out on elance, simply click on the link to my profile.

php | architect: Order Accepted

I was able to contact phparch.com's toll-free number and talk to a customer service representative. I contacted them to inquire about the shipping address that was registered in their database because I was being charged 11.90 USD for shipping even though I selected a US address for the shipping address. It turns out that the shipping address was indeed the US address, but since the billing address was a Philippine address, their system automatically charged shipping (this is apparently a bug). The lady on the line asked me to send a refund request once the order is accepted. At this time my order wasn't accepted yet since they manually had to check my credit card for validity.

I now know why my credit card was manually checked. It's a policy that they have right now, to check credit cards that have an overseas billing address. After that conversation, my order was accepted and I was able to download the soft copy of the book on my online account:

After they sent my receipt by email, I replied to them that they charged 11.90 for shipping and that I'm requesting a refund.


Now I'm waiting for the refund. They promised it will take about three days to credit back to my credit card.

Credit Card Manual Check

Today I tried to purchase the 2nd edition of Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide at phparch.com's online book store.


When I first tried to order the book by my saved credit card in my online account, it generated an error saying the number is invalid. So I entered my credit card details manually.

After the order, the site gave me this page:



It seems that I'm now suspected for credit card fraud. They will review my purchase manually. This is weird. It's not the first time I made a purchase from phparch.com.

You might also experience this, and note that this link will show on top of that page:


Is it because there was an error the first time I tried to use my saved credit card details and when I entered my credit card details manually they now get suspicious?

If you have any experience with phparch.com similar to this, do leave a comment.

Regular Server Maintenance

Some time ago, both Twitter and Drupal went offline. They had scheduled planned maintenance, but seemingly for two different reasons. I suspect Twitter again had too many tweets. It's a phenomenon that is happening rapidly. People seem to use Twitter a lot, increasing its server load. But in Drupal's case, it was doing an upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Whatever the case may be, down times are important. Servers, or at least clouds, work 24/7. Given the load that is bombarded into them, all loose ends need to be tied once in a while to make sure they don't crash.

Ubercart for Drupal

A few months ago I was able to set up a shopping cart for Drupal. I made it using Ubercart, a module you can easily install. It looks very seamless with a wide variety of payment methods. It emails you your invoice. It even has shipping cost calculations.

If you want to test it, you can check out this dummy site I made for testing the shopping cart. When calculating shipping costs, I set the pick-up address to a California 95262 zip code, so that's the origin of the package. Go ahead and try it at

http://cart.site40.net/

Freelance and Telecommute

My field specialization is web development in PHP. I can create web sites from scratch but also make use of content management systems to build sites on-the-fly.

I am currently accepting freelance work, so if interested, you may send me an email at

radx (AT) myspaceless.com

It's 2009!

Happy New Year to everyone! It's the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. I also just turned 28 on January 1.

For the previous year, it was met with a lot of challenges for many of us. The recession has affected first-world countries such as the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Singapore. There's less effect on us here in third-world countries but nevertheless the effect is there. Many Filipinos working abroad have returned to their motherland. Some have gotten laid off because of the financial crisis. Even my job hunt was not successful in Singapore, a first-world country that has a suffering economy as well.

As I'm writing this, I'm back in my motherland the Philippines. I'm currently a freelancer who's hopefully a future shareholder in a new business venture. The economy here has not changed much. Generally, companies pay as low as possible, and it seems that it's not easy to find employment that pays well based on experience, skills, and education. We just haven't reached that level in our job culture yet (my humble opinion).


Anyway, for the latest technology I've been exploring -- I recently got back to Drupal and learned more than I had at first. Drupal is viable for creating social networks, shopping carts, and point-systems (e.g. rewards for shoppers). I've tested all three features and they work. It's a growing active community with lots of modules to choose from. It's good to use for seamless integration that reduces the need to hard code. All you need to do is install the modules and activate them.

To a great year ahead...