The Lady Programmer

I am saddened by the recent turn of events that is a result of the global recession:

• A number of Filipino workers in Taiwan had been laid off and are now on the way back to the Philippines.
• TI Philippines, a US company right here in my hometown, has just laid off almost 200 workers and is expected to further reduce their workforce this year.
• Accenture Philippines had also reduced its workforce by 500 workers a few days ago.
• Today, Intel Philippines announced its intention of shutting down their two-decades old plant. This company employs 3,000 workers right now who will all be affected by the shutdown.

Aside from this I’ve ran across a few bloggers and some friends who had confessed about losing their jobs.

photo credit: Erik Charlton

Are we Filipinos too dependent on getting employed?

I believe we do. I have experienced that myself. After I got my degree, the next “good” thing is to get the first job related to my degree. I had been able to do that. I had a good job, but still, is not enough to meet my needs. It’s true, it can answer my personal needs but it does not come to the extent that I am able to save a significant portion of it for emergencies.

I was not alone. I saw my peers give up their jobs in favor of those higher paying overseas jobs. I saw people living a better life and enjoying an upgraded lifestyle. For those who are not keen on saving much, it would last them until the day when they decide to retire.

But workplaces change and the 80s is a decade when company retrenchments had happened. It becomes worse as crisis happens. The global economic crisis is one reminder that there is no such thing as a secure job anymore.

I just wish that the government would focus more on creating individuals who can build big businesses and companies. I think the government puts more emphasis on putting people to work overseas because the government relies on foreign remittances from these workers. Now that the recession is in, overseas workers are now losing their jobs – with the latest batch of workers ending up as the most unfortunate.

Do you just love it when someone blogs and links back to you?

I do, and I found this neat surprise over at oDesk which really got me too excited! The image is taken at one of the oConomy pages section of the site. Pretty neat huh!

I know a handful of bloggers who work with oDesk and had written their own version of blog posts, but I did not think that this blog post about getting paid by the hour in oDesk would make it as one of the helpful resources in their Articles section.

encircled link pointing to one of my blog posts

So far their reward is to give me two awesome free T-shirts that I got from their oDesk store, as a token of appreciation for putting up a good word about them.

oDesk gave me two T-shirts free!

Visit the actual link: Outsourcing to Philippines in oDesk’s oConomy

I just finished working on this piano music site just the other day:

It is actually a WordPress blog that is made to look like a website. The blog is just a subset of the design:

The site is not exactly new. This was its past design.

The site owner, Michelle, decided to host this site on Bluehost to save on paying for the $20 per month. The Bluehost package that she had taken allowed her to create as many blogs as she like to have. She included this one with her existing set of blogs in Bluehost to take advantage of the deal.

Since this site advertises professional piano services, I had decided to adapt a clean classy look for it. At one point I had considered black or even a combination of red and gray, but I decided to settle on browns and yellows.

The template was customized from the header to the background. I had also changed the RSS icons and the individual “bullet” icons at the sidebar. I’ve configured this one so that the sidebar appears only when the blog section is clicked by the visitor.

Under its hood, I had added a number of WordPress plugins for the site, such as the sideblog, Google sitemap generator and a number of useful plugins to catch spam and allow cache on the site.

Here is the working site: http://www.strictlypiano.com

Hey guys! I’m back, and with a bang. I hope you notice the new look of this site, but that is not the only thing that you’ll see here. The Lady Programmer is now on self-hosted WordPress!

new look on a new home

A good thing to have this Christmas, and just in time for me to realize that I have just turned to be a one-year old blogger!

I was so so very very happy to be given this push by Jaypee, a interesting Plurker behind the blog JaypeeOnline. He offered me the chance to move from Blogger platform to WordPress. As I prepared my blog weeks before, he had helped me with some things that he already know about setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog.

I did the header and took a fitting theme and made more changes. I have also decided to change my Entrecard widget while I modified the theme extensively. I still have some few loose ends left, but I think this blog is now ready.

I hope you like the new look!

I had mentioned previously that there are freelance SEO skills is always sought in many web design jobs. Many clients are now finding people who can optimize their sites for search engines.

Here are some job offers found in various freelance sites:

• Web designer and SEO optimization
  Need assistance updating current eCommerce website selling childrens products.  Need images optimized for website.  Need current webpages re-designed (using pappashop webhost interface) to new design parameters.  Need site optimized for search engine.
• Landing Page Specialist
  Create themed, siloed websites for specific keywords.
  Knowledge of creating landing pages that comply to Google Adwords Quality quality standards.
• Search Engine Optimization and Backlinking
  I am in need of SEO of my website. I am looking for someone to go through my website and update the PHP code with:
  1.  Keywords.  You can come up with a list and I can also give you the keywords.
  2.  Metatags.
  3.  Description.
  4. Create backlinks
  5.  Submit to search engines.
  6.  Link building

Not every trained programmer and web designer came out of school armed with an idea of what search engine optimization is. I met a lot of IT personnel who had no idea what good SEO can really do to their company websites.