As many of you will notice, this weekend we released a major update to EasyOutsource. Below is a list of the most prominent feature updates and improvements.

1. Upgrade to WordPress 3.1 and BuddyPress 1.2.5.

We upgraded the site to the newest versions of WordPress and BuddyPress. It took a significant amount of work to get the site ready to upgrade to the new version of BuddyPress, but it’s well worth it. This new version has many improvements and we’re now on the upgrade path to future updates as they come out. Later in the year you should expect improvements to privacy, search and messaging as these updates are rolled out in the “BuddyPress core.”

2. Favorites list replaces the Friends list.

We used to have a reciprocal friends list, much like Facebook. We came to the conclusion that this isn’t the ideal way to manage user connections on a job site, and so we removed it. Instead you will now see an “Add to Favorites” link on all [...] Continue reading

This weekend EasyOutsource officially passed the 2000 member mark. As of this writing there are 1350 workers, 681 employers and 430 open jobs. Congratulations to Jonnee Louh J. Busain on being our 2000th member. We’re working hard to grow this community for everyone. As mentioned previously we will be rolling out a major upgrade to EasyOutsource soon to make your experience here even better. We hope you will all enjoy it.

I had the privilege of writing a guest post for Kathy Dobson’s blog – Dedicated to Freedom.  Kathy is an advocate of outsourcing to the Philippines.  She was interested to hear from a Filipino outsourced worker’s point of view on the topic of outsourcing to our country, so I offered to write an article for her.

I was fortunate that readers and followers to Kathy’s blog were also interested to hear our opinion on the issues that surround the topic of outsourcing to the Philippines.  You can read my article on A Filipino freelancer’s thoughts on outsourcing by clicking on the link.

If you also have a topic you would want me to write about on Kathy’s blog, please give your suggestions on the comments section.

EasyOutsource now has a page on Facebook and on Twitter.

Become fans of our facebook page or follow us on twitter to get updates on the latest job posts, featured worker, new site features, new blog posts, etc.

Don’t be left behind, know what’s new on EasyOutsource by connecting with us on facebook and twitter.

As discussed in previous articles, EasyOutsource is built on a fantastic social networking platform for WordPress called BuddyPress. BuddyPress is updated by an active community of developers on a regular release cycle, and our site will be updated with new features as new versions of BuddyPress are rolled out.

Our site’s version number corresponds with the BuddyPress version number we are using. We are currently at EasyOutsource 1.1, built on BuddyPress 1.1.3. A major update to EasyOutsource (1.2) is right around the corner and will be using BuddyPress 1.2.5.

BuddyPress Roadmap: http://buddypress.org/about/roadmap

BuddyPress Development Updates: http://bpdevel.wordpress.com

Updates for EasyOutsource 1.2

Favorites List:

We are doing away with the Friends system entirely as it doesn’t make much sense on a job hiring site. We will be replacing it with the ability to add users to your Favorites list. It will work similarly to the existing Friends list, with the main difference being that Favorites are one-way (do not require a confirmation) and are private.

Sorting of search results:

You will be [...] Continue reading

We are proud to introduce a highly requested feature — the ability to leave feedback on user profiles. You can now leave feedback on people’s profiles and respond to feedback left on your own profile. We wanted to keep this as flexible as possible. We expect people to leave reviews as well as constructive criticism and suggestions.

We’re more than happy to feature guest authors, whether you’re an entrepreneur, a professional internet marketer or a site member looking to voice your opinion and gain exposure. Just fill out the form below if you’re interested in writing an article for us and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

For those of you who didn’t know, EasyOutsource has a forum.  We encourage you to use and participate in our forums to connect with fellow workers or employers, share your experiences in using the site, give comments and suggestions to the site’s admins, or just plain hang out.

We check the forums everyday for new posts that may require our answer or attention.  See you there!

Yesterday, June 7 2010, EasyOutsource was down from about 4 pm CST until around 4 am CST the following day. I want to first apologize to everyone for the inconvenience. We’re a business productivity site, and we’re not helping your productivity when you can’t access our site.

Second, for anyone interested, I want to let you know what happened and what we learned from it. This information may be useful to other website owners navigating the obscure world of hosting and server administration.

What Happened

EasyOutsource lives on a dedicated server in Los Angeles hosted by WebNX. Yesterday morning at around 11 am CST, the server stopped responding and required a hard reboot. Because the server stopped responding to the network before our monitoring services could collect data useful in diagnosing the problem, we weren’t exactly sure what had happened. After a quick reboot, everything seemed to be running fine.

Then, a few hours later, the server went down again. This time it did not recover from a reboot. Our server [...] Continue reading

You may have noticed a new link at the top of the site for the EasyOutsource Forum. We would like to hear your feedback about the site so that we can continue to improve the experience, so please add your thoughts over at the forum. What we’d like to know is: how can we improve the site? What are your most needed features? What areas of the site are confusing or difficult?

Feel free to create additional forum topics to discuss things other than site feedback. One of our goals with the forum is to give people an outlet to share their experiences and hopefully meet some new people in the process.