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

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.

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/