No doubt about it, freelancing is stressful.  Sure, it is rewarding and pays more than a regular day job; but the stress that comes along with it is also arguably more than you would encounter in a 9-5 job.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  There are steps that you can do in order for you to avoid stress.  Let’s identify the stressors and how we can overcome them.

• You don’t have enough clients or projects – One of the most stressful part of freelancing involves finances.  Specifically, tight finances.  If you are a freelancer who works for clients on a per project basis, there will be times when you will have no work and you will find the need to apply and bid for new jobs every few weeks.  This is very stressful because one, you are not earning any income and two, having to go through the application process every so often will take its toll on you.
  What you need to

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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!

Have you hired a Filipino contractor, assigned them a task, wait a few days for them to complete the task, wait a few more days, email them asking how they’re doing, with no response from them, and never hear from them again?

This scenario is very familiar and most definitely annoying, if you are subject to such behavior from a hired worker.  I am a Filipino online worker myself and am highly against this disappearing act from my fellow freelancers.  But oddly enough, this is commonplace and happens to even the best of them, so don’t take it personally.

Let’s discuss this eccentric behavior and try to solve the mystery of the disappearing freelancer.  First, let’s discuss common Filipino traits that are mostly the reason behind such disappearances:

• Most Filipinos are, by nature, non-confrontational. If faced with a situation where they are required to speak their minds out, they’d rather suck it up, keep their mouth shut, and just walk out on you and deal with their frustration on

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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

EasyOutsource has a fully custom adminbar (buddybar) for logged in users. Most BuddyPress sites are stuck with the default adminbar, which is not as easy to navigate as ours in my opinion. This article is a purely technical explanation about how to create a custom adminbar like on our site.

When using the default adminbar, you can go into General Settings > Hide admin bar for logged out users, and click Yes. This will restrict the adminbar to only logged in users when using things the default way. Once you’re going the custom route however, this setting becomes irrelevant.

When I decided I wanted to change the links in the adminbar, my first instinct was to find the actual code for the adminbar and edit it. However, I found out that this code is all part of the BP-Core, meaning it’s a bad idea to make major edits to it. If you ever want to upgrade BuddyPress you’ll lose those edits, and who knows if they’ll work when you try to add [...] Continue reading

You have heard time and again that the best country to outsource work to is the Philippines.  But, do you know the sites where you can hire Filipino online freelancers?

Here is a list of sites where you can hire Filipino contractors:

1. EasyOutsource.com – EasyOutsource is one of the best place to hire Filipino online freelancers.  Our site has an all-Filipino worker line up.  The site is growing rapidly.  The site is very easy to use and have a lot of features that are useful to a job site.  One of these features is an internal messaging system that employers and workers can use to communicate with each other.  We are constantly adding new features and improvements to the site to make it even better and easier to use.  The best part is, using the site is free for both employers and workers!  There are no registration fees involved.  You don’t have to pay anything to post jobs, browse profiles, browse job posts, and apply for jobs.  Isn’t that

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If you’re running a website on WordPress, a fantastic content management system, you will find that as your site becomes popular you’ll start to gather more and more spam comments. As a professional web designer, a common question I receive from clients is “How do I reduce the amount of spam I’m getting?” Here’s some suggestions that will eliminate most of your spam.

1. Make sure the Akismet plugin is enabled. If you don’t have it, download it here. You’ll have to get an API Key from WordPress to configure it. When you activate the plugin it will tell you how to quickly get an API Key… This will instantly reduce your spam count.
2. Install Cookies for Comments. It leaves a cookie in a user’s browser to make sure comments left by that user are tied to the cookie, to prove a person left the comment. If an automated script leaves a comment it will know this and will mark it as spam.
3. Restrict comments to registered users only. Go to the Settings

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For those who are unfamiliar, WordPress is a stable and flexible content management system for building powerful and easy to edit websites. It’s open source and has an enormous developer community, some of which are right here at EasyOutsource. I’m a huge WordPress fan and I plan on writing more about this topic in the future. Today’s post is about helping all of the business owners, online marketers, and web designers and developers here at EasyOutsource find the best WordPress theme layouts for the sites they need built.

My Favorite themes

One of my goals with using WordPress themes is to automate website construction, so Filipino developers can easily learn the themes and quickly build high-end websites. When I look at a site selling themes, my primary criteria for deciding if I’ll use their themes is how easily they can fit into the workflow of myself and my contracted workers. The most practical theme base I know of for this purpose is StudioPress.com, and I’ll explain why:

The themes at StudioPress are mostly [...] Continue reading

You applied for one of the jobs listed in easyoutsource and apparently, the employer liked your profile and has sent you a message that he/she would want to set up an interview with you.  This is your first interview invitation and you have absolutely no idea what to do next.  Now what?

If you are ever faced with an interview invitation, here’s what you should do:

1. Know the employer’s time zone - Check the employer’s profile and find out what country and city/state they live in.  Do your research and know their time zone and the time equivalent to the  Philippine time zone.  Determine a time that seems convenient for both you and the employer and take note of that time, in the employer’s time zone.
2. Prepare your method of contact – Different employers interview differently.  Some interview via email, some via chat, and some via voice chat.  Typically, employers like to conduct interviews via YM, Google Talk, MSN, and Skype.  You should try and get accounts with one

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For the interest of all concerned – easyoutsource admin, users, and commenters – we wish to lay out a reasonable comments policy for our blog.  The purpose for this is to serve as guideline for everyone who wishes to comment on any of our posts.

1. Fill out the comment form properly – When you comment on any of our posts, you are presented with a comment form.  Please fill this out properly.  Should you wish to use a name rather than your own, you may do so provided that it is a legitimate-sounding name (no profanities, please).  You may also fill up up the url box or you can choose to leave it blank. Comments using keywords, spam-like URLs, or suspicious information in the comment form will be edited or deleted.
2. Please mind you language and manners -  This blog is aimed to help EasyOutsource users.  Please do not use offensive or inappropriate language in your comments.  Any comment found to be rude and offensive will not be approved.

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