Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 7:20 am by andy

Can you say “swamped?”  We’ve been ridiculously busy with our freelancing and with our December 15 product launch (check out our new Universal Report Server at versareports.com!) and have totally neglected to write something for The Blog.

What’s new?  We just upgraded the FLT server to CentOS 5 (with latest versions of PHP and MySQL) because we found a problem in PHP4 related to our twice-monthly check to make sure that web URLs in our directory were up-to-date.  Our sincerest apologies if your web site was one of the ones erroneously caught by the problem, but the number was less than a handful, so we managed as best we could until we could spend some time upgrading the server.

Also new is this economy!  We’re seeing a lot more freelancers drop out than usual and fewer new freelancers signing up.  In 2008, we were getting about 20-30 new freelancers a month and losing maybe 5 per month.  This year, we’re seeing an add rate of about 10 per month and a loss rate of about 10 per month, so we’re holding steady at around 1000 freelancers in our directory (which turns into over 80,000! freelancer listings when you factor in the location and category for each freelancer).  If you know a freelancer who is not in our directory, point them in our direction!  Everyone can use a little more marketing help and we’re here to provide that.

We still get lots of feedback from freelancers that people are finding them through FreelanceLocalTech, so if you have a story to share, let us know!

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 2:53 pm by andy

Have you ever gone to a directory of links, found something that sounded useful, clicked the link, and got a “Page Not Found” error?  Don’t you think it hurts the quality of the site?

We do!  So we’ve instituted a new program that will run a couple of times a month to check all web links on the site.  If the web URL fails on two-consecutive runs, the freelance listing will get deactivated and the freelancer will get an e-mail message indicating that the listing was taken offline until the URL is corrected.

Although this will slightly reduce the count of listings in our database, potential clients will be happier and waste less time looking for someone like you.

If you find that you’re no longer going to freelance, please take the time to remove your listing from our directory.  If you haven’t signed up yet, know that we value your contribution to our directory and are working hard to create the best freelancer listing available.

On another note, sorry for the delay since my last blog entry.  I’ve been swamped with consulting work lately.  I’ll start posting good articles again very soon.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:03 pm by andy

We cleared 600 consultants today.  Our traffic is also up about 40% from 2 months ago.

Let us know how we can help your further or how we can help freelancers who don’t feel like this is a good place to list their services.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 10:35 am by andy

March 12: Sphider, our search engine, died.  The latest set of countries took the number of dynamic pages over the 150,000 mark.  Sphider’s indexer wasn’t designed to handle anything that big, and it couldn’t complete a full re-index of the site.  Sphider also supported only single-threaded indexing and with that many pages (and we expect to have nearly 300,000 pages when we’re done adding countries later this year), the time to re-index ballooned from about 18 hours to nearly 130 hours (estimated, since the indexer never finished).  That’s too long for our needs.

So we temporarily removed the search boxes for everything but the blog area.  Our plan is to try to have a replacement in the next couple of weeks.  We think we’ve identified at least one open-source search engine that will work well for us, but the proof will be in our test box as we try to get it to run a full index in under a day without wiping out our box’s ability to serve pages to users.

We’ll post an update to this blog entry when we have a replacement in place.

March 21 UPDATE: We finally have DataparkSearch Engine in place.  It’s a native Linux application that runs as a CGI.  Searches are fast, indexing is still slow, but I can now see that indexing speed is a function of the VPS on which this site is hosted.  However, unlike Sphider, I don’t think we’ll need to do full re-indexing every week to catch any new pages.  We’ll see.  I’ll post another update in a few weeks after we see how the search engine is doing.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:33 pm by andy

Hopefully, this is the last infrastructure post for a while.  We added another 14 countries this morning, bringing the total to over 25 countries and 8000 new cities in the past 3 weeks.  New to the site are Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Israel, Pakistan, New Zealand, and South Africa!

We’re likely done adding more countries for a little while, because we have some big projects starting up tomorrow on the consulting side.  In the meantime, tell your freelancing buddies in Europe and parts of Asia to sign up while we’re offering the listing upgrade bonus.

On our radar for the next places for FreelanceLocalTech are the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, and Russia, but I don’t think we’ll get there before July….  In the meantime, let us know which countries are important for us to add by leaving a comment.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 8:43 pm by andy

We’ve only gotten a few backlinks by offering a 2-month 60-mile upgrade, so we’re going to take a page from our competion: sites that link back to us will automatically be pushed toward the top of the city listings, so that they appear before sites that don’t have a backlink to FreelanceLocalTech.

We now have a script running twice monthly to look at all freelancer web sites.  If we detect a backlink from your web site within either the home page or any page directly linked from the home page, your listing will be displayed higher in the city pages than any freelancer’s listing where we didn’t find a backlink.

Anyone with an existing backlink upgrade will get to keep the upgrade until it expires.

We’ll be publishing and e-mailing our next newsletter containing this news and other tips in the next few weeks.  Any topics you’d like to see covered in it?

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 2:40 pm by andy

We just added 12 new countries to the site: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and Switzerland!  Over 5000 new cities in this new batch of places where we can help freelancers hook-up with local clients!!

Any freelancers from these countries as well as India and Ireland (which we just added last week) will automatically receive a 2-month 60-mile upgrade.  Add a backlink to us from your site and we’ll extend that by 2 more months!

Another interesting tidbit: I did a quick query on the database and we have over 52,000 listings out here.  With just over 550 consultants, that means that the average freelancer listing has nearly 100 chances to be viewed by potential clients who browse the site.  How many directories can say that?

Our next batch of countries will include Japan, Israel, and parts of northern and eastern Europe… and should happen in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned!

What countries would you like us to add next?

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 10:49 am by andy

We now support freelancer listings in India and Ireland!  Woo-hoo!!

Because the Republic of Ireland does not support postal codes outside of Dublin, we needed to invent a new way for people to sign up and declare their ”base” location.  For other countries, it was the postal code; in India and Ireland (and likely for many countries we plan to add over the next few months), we ask the freelancer to select the city nearest their location from our list of cities in their state/province/territory.  That city is then used like the postal code: all cities within 30 miles (48 km) of the selected “base” city will include the freelancer listing.

Now that we have this new technique for handling countries without postal codes, we can more quickly add new countries.  I think the next set will be Western Europe, then Eastern Europe, and then we’ll look at our analytics and see which region should follow.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 7:48 pm by andy

After a really slow holiday season — and totally stopping our marketing for December – we finally made it to 500 listings!

Interestingly, our traffic without having to advertise has been about 70% of our traffic when we were advertising and the cost is a lot less.  So we’re going to spend more time on organic marketing and delay any further advertising until we add a new country or two (Ireland is next!).

Although we’re not the biggest directory by any measure, we definitely have high-quality listings, which is important to clients.  Ever been to a directory and found dead link after dead link while the site owner claimed they had thousands of links?  Not here!  If there’s a dead link, we want to remove it as soon as possible.  Clients appreciate not having their limited time wasted by chasing dead links.

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 10:52 pm by andy

Finally!

We finally changed the look to something brighter, more appealing, and — we hope — easier to use.  We tested it a bunch, but it’s possible we missed something, so please let us know if you find anything that doesn’t look or work right.  Drop us a note to the support e-mail address listed in the Support/Help page (the link is at the bottom of every site page).

We finally added England, Scotland, and Wales (Great Britain).  We will likely add Ireland next, which brings up the question as to whether we should group Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, even though Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.  We’re thinking that we’ll list it as the country of Ireland and break out the two areas as though they were different “states” or regions.

We also changed the Technical Writer category to also include writers who write documents and articles that are not necessarily of a technical nature.  So, Welcome Writers!

During November, in anticipation of rolling out our new look and adding Great Britain, we cut our marketing and advertising budget in half.  Our traffic only dropped by about 10% and our sign-ups by about 30%, so we think our organic (free!) traffic is starting to pick up enough that we can permanently cut back on our pay-per-click ads.  Our thought is that in December, the only pay-per-click ads we’ll run will be in Great Britain and we’ll look to purchase ad space in places where it’ll reach freelancers who haven’t heard about us yet. 

If you have any ideas about where we can hunt for more freelancers, please let us know.  Also, if you’re already signed up, tell a freelancing buddy about us!  And let us know if you get a client call based on your listing here.