What's wrong with the Freelancing industry

What's wrong? I'll tell you whats wrong. The big corporations with their profit at all cost mentality is what's wrong! Of course the same is true for so many things wrong today.

A bit over 10 years ago I jumped into the realm of working from home, coding PHP, PERL and BASH, writing articles, doing some LINUX sysadmin stuff etc. It wasn't easy, but there were a few good websites that made it a lot easier to not only find the work, but they also had measures in place to protect coders and clients from trying to scam one another.

In exchange for the service provided to coders and their clients, these "few good freelance sites" took a small cut of the money the coder earned once the project was completed and the client paid for the work. Life was good, work was plentiful and everybody won.

Well, not anymore. Since then the big fish have bought out and buried the little fish so coders like me are left with almost no choice on whom to do business with. However, it's not enough for these big fish to have a monopoly. Nope they want to squeeze every nickel out of the people that earn them money.

Take one predominant player in the realm for example. FreelancerDOTcom (who I'll refer to as FLC from here on) bought two of my favorite freelance websites, ScriptlancerDOTcom & RentACoderDOTcom along with several others, not only getting the business, but the coders and clients involved in those sites as part of the purchase.

Had FLC retained the business model those 2 other sites used, I wouldn't be writing this, but nope, FLC had to go the profit at all costs route and milk the people that earn them money for even more.

First, the old expression it takes money to make money has never been more true. Freelancers like me need to pay just to accept the work. Yes that's right, coders pay up front before being paid by their respective clients and of course FLC skims off of that transaction too. It simply does not make sense to anyone but the corporate big wigs behind it. Freelance coders are being charged for the "privilege" of earning FLC money. It doesn't matter what your track record is, how many years you've been completing projects and creating satisfied return clients etc. YOU PAY FIRST in order to earn.

But wait, there is more to this utterly asinine business model. Freelancers who accept a project have no way out of it. There is no way to cancel and even if you manage to get high enough up the food chain to have a project cancelled on your behalf, the fee you paid is NON-REFUNDABLE. In my entire Freelancing career I have had to cancel 2 projects out of hundreds. It doesn't matter. The 10% FLC immediately charges is theirs permanently, even if the client's "job" turns out to be illegal and in violation of international trade laws. It doesn't matter. They got your money and you won't be getting it back.

I used to mention Freelance sites that I liked here. Well I can't think of any now. So I suppose I'll have to change perspectives.

Freelancers, you would do well to avoid FLC..

Clients looking for freelancers to put to work are also advised to avoid FLC. The coders on FLC pay to be able to accept your work, and the bulk of the "qualification badges" you might see on their profile were purchased too. They mean nothing other than they bribed the outfit correctly and through proper channels. All it takes is a few bucks to get one and they say absolutely nothing about the freelancers "skill".

How can freelancers protect themselves from scamming clients?

Those that know me, know I've been a freelance web developer off & on for the majority of the last 13 years. Over that time, I thought I had learned the appropriate steps to take to prevent myself from getting ripped off. Well, it would seem I wasn't as prepared as I thought I was.

I take great interest in helping small & family owned businesses to create an effective web presence. In the past I've even offered to do the work for free, at extremely low hourly rates or for a small percent of future sales, as was the case in this lesson I recently learned.

In this case, I was asked to resurrect a website that appeared to be originally authored around 2003, using WYSIWYG editors such as Netscape Composer, and later M$ Frontpage. There was no rhyme or reason to the site's navigation, directory/file structure etc. Image files were not at all optimized and the site was just riddled with mistakes both visible and in the underlying code. Clearly a novice web master had gotten in over their head, created a site that was impossible to maintain, and doing very poorly in terms of search engine performance. I thought, great ! I can fix this !

Once I had the bulk of their "content" ported over to a bright and shiny installation of Wordpress, I put it up on their web server and started to address my many marketing concerns. So I asked the client to confirm himself as owner of the business on the Yelp page that already had the bulk of their business information. The phone number and location were no longer current, but in my mind, the most important part, the URL to the website was correct. I also asked the client for a PSD Photoshop file of their logo, since they had mentioned it was "done professionally", I would expect them to retain the PSD file for later use.

That was when the red flags started waving vigorously in the winds of deceit that I started to sense. They didn't have a PSD file of their logo, only PNG, JPG and BMP versions of the same logo making the touch-ups they were requesting impossible. They also said they couldn't claim the Yelp entry as their own, they weren't at that address any more, and the phone number had since changed. I suggested a new phone number to Yelp, and asked the client to try the "Claim my business" process again. Their response "it didn't work". So, I requested they create a new Yelp account. They blatantly refused and asked "Why is that such a big deal?". Clearly any legitimate business owner is not going to respond this way when offered free marketing. So I responded with something similar to "verify yourself as the legitimate business owner or I'm not going to continue the work" They responded by changing the FTP password to their server, and changing the "author" password for the Wordpress account I had created for them.

I contacted them shortly after, asking why the FTP password was changed, pointing out it made it difficult to get to the unoptimized images, optimize them and re-upload them.. when in fact I really didn't need it. No response. I waited a day, still no response.

So, after nearly 48 hours of silence I logged into Wordpress as admin, and went about deleting all the pages and posts I had made, and then emptied the trash. Then I edited the child theme I had tailored to execute some PHP which deleted the optimized images I had created, and then tweaked it to become inoperable. As a final step, I switched the Wordpress theme to ugliest I could find and made a single post, a series of links I had found when investigating the company and clients name.

Turns out this outfit has been involved in something called a Phoenix scam since 2003. In 2006 they were convicted of fraud. The Phoenix scam falls into the "Long Con" realm of cons and is named such because the company rises, does some legitimate work offering extremely generous warranties then claims bankruptcy, making the warranties and future contracts void. The "owner" then sells the company to a co-conspirator who raises the company from the ashes, and does the same thing again.

Apparently I was the unfortunate web developer tasked with helping with the third rising of this Phoenix. Once I realized what was happening, I swiftly clipped it's wings. I lost a lot of time for which I will never be paid, but at least I didn't become an unknowing accomplish to these scammers. As a result, I've amended my rule book.

1. If the client does not have a "confirmed" Yelp page , require them to claim their business before doing ANY work at all.
2. Do some basic Google searches to ensure that client provided content is not copied from a "competing" website. Copy a few long sentences from their text and see if you can find it identically on other sites by wrapping it with quotes.
3. Look at the headers of their emails and glean the originating IP address of the sender. Use a free service like IP2Location.com to ensure they are at least near the region they claim to be in. If the originating IP address is in a private range like 10.0.0.0, or 192.168.0.0, be very suspicious and act accordingly.
4. Do the bulk of the work on your own server and do not place it on the clients server until you have been paid at least 50% of the agreed price.
5. Have a backup plan to cripple the site, but leave it in a restore-able state, in the event the client doesn't pay in full. In the case above, keeping the Wordpress Admin password to myself served that purpose. To ensure I could restore the content in the event my suspicions were wrong, I should have used the Wordpresses built in "export" widget, but by that point I was 100% certain I had called it correctly.

It's embarrassing to admit I almost fell for this, but if it saves a community from getting scammed again, and/or another freelancer from the turmoil I went through.. It's worth it.

It's all about the backlinks

I know I've written in the past that I primarily do "on site SEO", making sure my client's site is friendly to both human visitors, and search engine spiders, but once that aspect is done, all that is left to do is build up the number of relevant backlinks to your site, and of course continue to add quality content to it.

So, how do you do that? Well, there are numerous ways, one is to write witty articles and cross your fingers that some of your viewers will link to it. Great for organic (as in non-automated) backlinks, but not so good if you need to build up backlinks quickly.

You can also make your articles available for other webmasters to publish on their sites via RSS, or use one of the numerous article syndication sites out there.

Another way is to give away a freebie web widget, like a small but useful javascript widget that other webmasters can include on their own sites, of course including a plain text link in the copy/paste code you provide them. The drawback here is you have no control over what the subject, or the quality of the linking site is, but typically the majority of these types of links will be beneficial to your site.

And yet another way is to visit other sites related to your topic, posting in forums or commenting on blog posts, including an occasional non-spammy link to your own site. Emphasis on "non-spammy", because if those webmasters are anything like me, any comment spam will be removed within minutes of you posting it.

There are likely other ways, but the one remaining I can think of at the moment is to pay for them. Granted, search engines like Google have some pretty intelligent ways of detecting paid links, and if you set off the "paid link" alarm, you are basically throwing your money away. Worse, you might trigger a penalty and wind up worse off than you are now.

I won't go into detail about how to avoid setting off that alarm, because I truly believe in order to rank well in search engines you need to actually provide something that is useful, entertaining or informative (hopefully I do all 3 here)

One service that I know of, which works pretty well is called Text Link Ads. Says what it does, does what it says. I've been both a publisher and an advertiser using their services, and it does work, if you are willing to shell out some cash, and be picky about what sites your link will appears on.

Another method, although I've had mixed results, is to find a freelancer that specializes in back link building. Scriptlance is a good place to look, but be careful.

Hiring whomever has the lowest bid is likely to be a waste of time and money. It could also damage your site's search engine rankings if done incorrectly.

Whomever you hire, ask to see previous examples of their work. Are the links they've created grammatically correct? Is the syntax correct? Are they in context with the pages they appear on? Do those pages appear in Google's index ? Does the page have noindex/nofollow tags ? Do they look spammy? Automated ?

There are a lot of things to consider when going this route. It can be done, but results can vary, widely. The main thing to consider is the fact that Google has a legion of some pretty bright people whose sole purpose in life is to detect and devalue non-organic back-links. Actually they teach computers to do it, but you get my point.

This concludes today's witty, useful, entertaining and informative article.

Until next time. Cheers !

Save the binvironment !!!

I came up with an expression about 10 years ago regarding 2 major players in the
realm of technology, Intel makes em' faster, Microsoft makes em' slower...
Taken at face value you might not get my meaning. What I mean is software developers will continue pushing the limits of the hardware of the times.

The same is true today but now a broadband internet connection is a required hardware component for my system, without it I can't work or play. And of course software developers, rather web developers are working hard to reach the limits. VOIP and streaming media are good examples of this trend.

But I'd like to draw your attention to the unwanted/unintentional bloat that is getting into the mix, particularly the bloat that comes about in HTML code when using WYSIWYG editors, or image files that have not been optimized. BLOAT BAD! for numerous reasons, some of which you might not realize.

Another contributor to the total saturation of the information highway is web sites not responding to "if-modified" requests correctly, which is esepcially true of many PHP driven web applications. This in turn can prevent the content from being cached properly, and must be re-served for every request.

And yet another contributor, most web servers are capable of compressing content before sending it to the viewer. In most situations enabling this compression is a good trade of spare cpu ticks in exchange for smaller amounts of data to send down the wire.

So yes, save the binvironment.

If you are a web developer..

• Optimize / crop images
• Inspect your HTML, removing bloat code.
• Avoid inline CSS styling, use an external css file
• Avoid inline Java, javascript use an external js file
• Check that your web site responds reasonably to "if-modified" requests.
• Check that your web server is compressing content before sending

By the way a pretty handy place to check server responses is http://redbot.org
After submitting your domain's URL, click the "check assets" link. They even
have a handy bookmarklet you can use. SWEET!

Apparent java script problem with IE8

<a href="http://www.somesite.com"
onclick="location.href='./out.php?ID=XXX';return false;">
SITE NAME</a>


The above works in every browser I tested except IE8. I've read many others have the same issue, but most forums were related to ASP, VB and .NET (whose developer's have an inclination to use Microsoft products for all things from browsing to buttering toast) and the suggested workarounds were simply not applicable to PHP.

Some suggestions relying on other Microsoft products looked incredibly convoluted, but then the simplest ASP script looks like spaghetti code to me. Still, they must be great platforms, after all, you have to pay through the nose for the pleasure to work with them.

Anyways.. possibly, adding this to the meta tag section of your pages will fix it.. if you are lucky.. Do you feel lucky ? Well, do ya ?

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

This reportedly tells IE8 to act like IE7 which is slightly less broken, a sure sign of Microsoft's version of progress.

YO MICROSOFT ! There is a java script issue with IE8 ! You know, java script? that standardized browser unspecific language invented by your arch nemesis Netscape© that like so many others you've attempted to bastcardize into a proprietary McLanguage ?

I expect a 134MB down-loadable patch to address this issue within the month.

And by the way, quit trying to create your own version of web standards in order to broaden your attempted monopoly on all things computer related. Just be happy with your domination of the operating system, office software and game console markets.

The flexability of Wordpress

I am continually amazed at all the ways Wordpress can be used. Granted, it was initially intended to
act as a blog, and still does of course, but it, it's thousands of plug-ins and themes have evolved,
making Wordpress suitable for just about any web based endeavor you can think of.

Speaking of add-ons. What Wordpress article would be complete without touting the can't live without add ons, so here it is...   Contact Form 7 and the All in One SEO Pack.   A very short list yes?

I've done a few dozen Wordpress installs by now, and without fail the very first things I add is Contact Form 7. No matter what you intend to do with Wordpress, you will almost certainly have a contact form, and while Wordpress includes one out of the box, it isn't nearly as feature rich.

The All in One SEO Pack is another plug-in I almost always install. It allows you to tailor title and meta tags, and acts as a gentle reminder that unique pages ideally have unique meta tags and such.

The remaining must have Wordpress add-ons really depend on what you intend to do. For example, if you intend to make photos and graphics an integral part of your website, you'll want to install the NextGEN Gallery plugin. If you want to sell stuff, you'll want the WP e-Commerce add on.

If your site becomes popular, and possibly sluggish, then I'd suggest you look into adding the WP Super Cache, but since it caches the pages, this is typically the last thing I add, since it can make tweaking Wordpress themes tedious, having to clear the cache after every edit.

Then there are the various forum applications you can add. Granted some integrate with Wordpress better than others, but typically, the forum doesn't really need to be integrated at all, just skinned to match the look of your Wordpress installation.  Without a doubt my favorite forum software is SMF, and I usually use it, but sometimes Buddypress may be better suited, depending on your needs. There is also something called WP-Forum, which I haven't tried yet, but it does look promising.

So what else do you want your website to do? Chances are there is a Wordpress add on that does it, and if not, plenty of documentation and help out there. You could also of course hire a Freelancer like me :p

What is your website actually worth ?

If you are curious what your own website is worth you likely have used one of the numerous online tools that calculate it's value. The problem is, these simply can not be accurate, and often give the website owner a false impression their site is worth much more than it actually is, or occasionally much less.

Using one of my own site's I've tested numerous services that calculate a website's value and the numbers have been all over the map, one as low as $67 and one as high as $16,000

The truth is, things, website's included, are worth what someone is willing to pay for them. So how can you get a reasonable idea of what your website is worth? Do the same thing other businesses do. Figure out how much profit the site makes in a year and multiply that number by 3 to 5.

For example, I have a website that earns roughly $1000 a year (not much I know, but it's a start) So if I were to sell it I'd start with an asking price of $5000, but might consider an offer as low as $3000.

This not to say the website worth calculators are meaningless, they can be used as a general gauge to evaluate a site's performance month to month, but for that I prefer a different set of tools...

Website Grader http://websitegrader.com
Offers a free and in depth report of how well the site is doing in terms of on site SEO optimization and off site factors. What I like most about it is the advice is sound when it detects an area of your site that could use improvement and the overall "score" is easy enough for me to remember from month to month.

There are of course gentle nudges to register for their free trial, which I haven't yet, but I suspect that would be time, and potentially money well spent.


Push 2 check http://push2check.com
I recently discovered this handy site and have made it part of my daily ritual, right after my morning coffee and email check. I could probably cut back to weekly checks. Maybe I have a slight case of OCD? Anyways, the cool thing about this site is it keeps track of your previous stats, so you can easily see if your site's overall performance is improving or not over time. It's also a pretty handy way to access other performance indicators like the almighty Google page rank, Alexa score and counts of social bookmarks.

So in the end, like I said, your web site is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, but with the tools above, a bit of hard work and persistence you can increase it's value over time.

The lost art of writing HTML

I remember back in grade school, while I got pretty good grades for spelling and English grammar, I continually got bad marks for penmanship. Yes it's true, my handwriting was terrible. It seemed I was destined to print all my life, or maybe become a doctor, a profession where illegible scribblings is typical.

But eventually, with practice my handwriting improved. Then along came the computer age, and almost everything I've "written" was typed. Now if I actually need to write something, it's nearly as bad as it was back in my grade school days.

This is what I see happening now with HTML. The typical "webmaster" has become so dependent on WYSIWYG HTML editors, that when tasked with actually writing HTML themselves, they fail miserably,, but who cares right? as long as it looks ok, who cares how terrible the underlying code is.

In fact malformed HTML code became the accepted norm. Web browsers developers even started compensating for it. Oh, you forgot to close your paragraph tag before opening another...  no problem, the browser just fixed this for you, and unless you actually scrutinized the source code, you'd never know of the mistake.

Many website owners are just like me when I became dependent on the keyboard, and as a result today the typical website is full of what I call bloat code and HTML errors.. but that's OK, because today's web browser just compensate for it.  I'm not convinced this is actual progress.

Search and replace where you need it.

Being able to search and replace text, regardless of how it is stored is a humoungous time saver so I thought I'd share a couple methods I use.

SSH BASH perl one line search replace
I usually do my file editing & programming work via SSH with PuTTY so a command line search and replace is really handy especially when large amount of files are involved. Here is an example of altering one file . . .

perl -pi -e "s/old text/new text/gi;" filename.txt

Remove the g to only replace the 1st occurrence of old text. Remove the i to make it case sensitive.

Of course replacing the example filename "filename.txt" with files you actually need to alter, for example, change all mentions of oldsite to newsite in all .php files in the current directory


perl -pi -e "s/oldsite/newsitet/gi;" *.php

Or, to do every php file even ones in sub directories...

perl -p -i -e 's/oldsite/newsite/g' `find ./ -name *.php`

Of course perl and BASH being what they are, there are likely 30 different ways to do th same thing, but thus far this one has worked just fine. It is also incredibly fast

What I recommend is copy the files you plan to do search replaces on to a new temporary directory, and test your search replace commands to ensure they have no undesired consequences.


MySQL query to search replace.

Often I need to quickly and accurately change text in a MySQL database.  Here is a MySQL query that does exactly that.

update [table_name] set [field_name] = replace([field_name],'[string_to_find]','[string_to_replace]'); 

Using PHPMyAdmin it is pretty easy to make a copy of the table and use it for test runs of search replace queries. Depending on the application a search replace done incorrectly could spell disaster so never ever do search replaces on a live and in use mysql table.

As an example, I wind up moving a lot of Wordpress websites in my freelance work, typically from my own development area on my webserver, to the new account my client has created for their live Wordpress site. This MySQL query can be modified for your use when moving a Wordpress site.

update wp_options set `option_value` = replace(`option_value`, 'URL TO MY WORDPRESS DEV', 'URL TO THE LIVE WORDPRESS SITE');

Other methods.

While I live in a SSH shell most of my computing day I am on a Windows workstation. and occasionally do need to search replace text files on my own hard drive. Thus far I don't have an elegant solution but using Windows file search, with the content search option I can get a nice tidy list of files that need the edit. I can then select as many as I need (or as many as my computer can handle) and right click to open with Notepad++ . From there I can do a search replace on all open documents and save them in a couple of clicks.

Software mentioned in the article
PuTTY :  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
Notepad ++ : http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

Tiny little trickling income streams

I know a lot of website owners that spend their time and money making their site as good as it can be. For them it's not about making a buck, it's about giving back, which is of course a good thing.. but, there is certainly nothing wrong
with supplementing your income so that at the end of the month you are at least covering the costs of hosting your website, and if you come out ahead, well that's even better.

So here I will cover some of the ways you can get your website earning a bit of income. Depending on how much traffic your site gets, you aren't likely to be retiring early from the money you make, but you should be able to at least cover your monthly web hosting costs.

Google Adsense :
Adsense is probably the most widespread and popular way to monetize a website. After signing up you can create banner ads as well as text link blocks to spread around your site. Further you can customize the colors and even fonts they use. Which colors work best on your website is a hot topic for debate, so I suggest creating 2 custom pallets that blend well with your site's colors, then set all your banner ads to cycle through up to four random pallets, selecting your 2, and either 2 stock pallets or your own that contrast your site's color scheme.

Google will cycle through the color pallets available, and eventually start favoring the one that results in the highest click through rate.

You can also limit banner ads to images only, text only, or both. I suggest both, again, Google will start favoring the format that provides you the best potential earning.

You can have up to 3 banner ads, and up to 3 text link units on each page, but more isn't always better. And of course where your adsesne code is placed on your web pages can have quite an effect on their performance. Often a square banner ad wrapped by your site's content, like the one shown on this page will outperform the typical banner in the header and footer. Likewise, text link units often perform well when directly below your site's main content.

Either way, make a habit of doing a monthly tweak, change one thing, placement, format, color etc. and let it run for a month before deciding whether you have increased or decreased your site's revenue.

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Chitika :

Chitika's Premium Ad units is one of the few website ad services that can be used in conjunction with Google Adsense.

After adding the Premium Ad code to your website, only visitors that were referred to your site through a major search engine will see the ad. So your regular viewers, who get to your site through a bookmark, or other link won't see the Chitika ads.

Like Adsense, placement and color choices can affect your revenue, so yet again, make a monthly tweak, and review the performance.

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Text-Link-Ads :

Once your site has been around for a while and has a decent and steady stream of traffic you can sell static links to other sites at rates you determine. TextLinkAds will estimate what they think a link on your site should sell for and once you have sold a link placement, they split the income from it 50/50 which may not sound like such a great deal, but when you consider they handle everything, leaving you to continue work on your website, it works our pretty well.

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There are of course numerous other ways to monetize a website and I've only touched on a few here which I have had experience with. I'm curious what visitors might have to say about these, or other methods of site monetization , so let the comments fly!

Websites with Flash intros, things that make you go BLEH!

As is hopefully apparent by now, I'm a freelance coder, eeking out an existence coding websites, writing niche applications, usually in PHP. Occasionally I'll run across a project where I am creating a web sites from the ground up, instead of extending/tweaking an existing site.

When I get such a project, I find I am quite apprehensive to the response I get when I request a complete feature list.. there is much pacing, biting of nails and overall nervousness as I refresh the contents of my inbox, and damn, there it is.. They want a Flash intro... BLEH !!!

Now of course everyone is entitled to an opinion. If you think Flash intros are cool and actually watch them when you see one, instead of immediately clicking the "skip" link, then hey, more power to you, but you are in the minority. The majority of people click the skip link within nano seconds, and if they can't easily find it, they will hit the back button rather than wait for your flashy intro to complete. Likely giving you the exact opposite to the reaction you were hoping for..

From a technical, SEO and good ol' experience perspective, a Flash intro, even one with a prominently displayed skip link really hinders your site's ability to be suggested as a search result and often actually deters visitors from returning once they have discovered your site.

Presumably you want as many people as possible to sign up for the mailing list, buy your products & services and partake in the activities your site promotes. That means getting web traffic, which in turn means providing copious amounts of relevant text on the most important page of your site to search engines, so that they can determine what the site is about and categorize it, then suggest it where applicable.

On a new site especially, with few or no links pointing to it, it will be some time before search engines start suggesting your site in search results. You need to make the site's content as easily
accessible to both humans and search engine spiders, and frankly, Flash intros hinder both, not to mention they make the majority of your visitors go BLEH and/or go away.