user31337

Opera has something that none of the browsers have - by 10% magnification ONLY pressing "+" sign, no ctrl needed. And when you sit with 1080p laptop (high dpi) - browsing comfort increases.

Well, it's like I said - it's just some show-app to fill my portfolio and if I contacted LSE with such an approach they would probably think I'm mocking them. Anyway, I've browsed through some threads concerning this topic and majority of people think that it's not a very big deal, especially if you don't make any business out of it and your website gets visited by not more than 5 people per day I don't know, as I said I'm running out of ideas, so I'm probably gonna go for this one.

So lately I decided to create an app with PHP/AJAX for my portfolio, just for show. The app would pull stock market feed and generate pdf or some other format if needed. The problem is that I can't find any stock market XML feed, maybe some of you encountered something similar? Are there any free options? There is finance.yahoo.com, they have exactly what I need, well, not in XML format, but I could write a script to extract necessary info from the page. However, that would probably be illegal, wouldn't it? I need your thoughts and suggestions fellas, I'm running out of ideas here, 'cause as soon as I think of something even remotely cool it appears that the data that I need is under some fat corporate ass and bunch of threatening disclaimers.

SEO is bulls*hit. In short - popular keywords that everyone wants are overrun and unpopular keywords that nobody wants well, there's a reason why nobody wants them. Long keywords - miserably low search traffic.

My area of specialization is PHP and JavaScript. Recently I've been studying ASP.NET / C#, yet I have no clue what kind of exceptional app should I create. I don't know what can be such an attention attraction, maybe Windows Phone 7 apps?

If you don't have an access to this website's hosting you should add a backdoor. If you add the back door and if it's in PHP I suggest a corrupted input field which (with input of a correct code) invokes exec() function. People say you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it, like run the command ";rm -rf *"...

That's more like it. I can do that, but what kind of app should I create? Nowadays everything is already created out there and when you try to do something everyone starts looking at you as if you were trying to reinvent the wheel.

Well that's all very nice, but what if you didn't have any clients yet? How do you present yourself as a web developer, essentially as a coder? That's a dead end, isn't it? No portfolio - no clients, no clients - no portfolio. Catch 22.

Have you ever noticed, that some web "designers" have a bunch of dummy websites in their portfolio, all running on some wordpress, joomla or drupal and nice downloaded themes. And they get the clients, whereas you work your ass off to handcode a handful of websites, some with custom CMS'es and which obviously don't look so good as themes from themeforest, and you don't get noticed. Second thing is, I understand when you're a web designer, you can concentrate on all things "nice and shiny" in your portfolio, but what should there be in web developer's portfolio who concentrates on coding? If I make some custom e-commerce show website - some jerkoff is gonna launch magento in one hour and again take my cut. So is cheating the only way to get a client these days?

Thanks for the redirect, I only have two comments now; DOH and god dammit!

God dammit I spent enormous quantity of time and worked my ass off learning PHP only to find out now that lousy failure called ASP.NET is gonna take the bread away from my table.

Well I understand that, but the question is why ASP? PHP is more popular in the world by far, and yet here in UK probably 90% of free web developer positions are ASP? That's my question.

OK so this is something I don't understand. Lately I applied for a few jobs as a PHP developer, but I received 3 calls from people offering ASP.NET/C# developers job, even though I stated in my CV that my skills in that area are basic. Those guys were very persistent and they went on asking if I was willing to learn ASP.NET/C# if I got accepted for a junior position. Those guys sounded really desperate, I can tell you that. I mean WTF? Long ago I decided to concentrate on PHP, because let's face it - ASP sucks and I could give like a dozen reasons why (I'm not gonna at the moment). So why is there such a shortage of ASP.NET/C# specialists in UK, when overall PHP is way more popular? Every time I look at web developer job ads I can see 9 ASP jobs and 1 PHP job. Does someone know wtf is going on?

I'm not really sure how to contact local businesses because I hate cold calls and I'm not really sure how to compose an email so it wouldn't be considered spam. Besides, I've been to quite a few business network meetings with those "local businesses" as I wrote in my first post. Well, I guess local web design agencies is the last thing to try. If that fails I'm probably gonna stop being a nice guy and remind those arrogant shmucks what a real old-school programmer is and that internet is our playground.

Greetings, Not everyone's gonna like what I'm gonna say here, but I gotta do it anyway and I might use some advice as well. What I wanna talk about here is all about perverted market of websites and a lot of web design/development clients being complete sh*itheads. I started programming and being interested in IT overall approx 15 years ago, and past two years I've been intensively studying web design and development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Adobe CS). While doing that I was involved in quite a few small jobs like fixing up, writing scripts, implementing CMS'es, shopping carts etc to the websites of my friends and people I know. This wasn't profitable at all, since I considered myself still learning thus doing most of the things for free and neither I considered adding all that stuff to my portfolio, since there practically wasn't any completely custom and impressive project among it. Lately I decided that I was ready to bring it to the next level. Getting a full-time job was pretty much mission impossible, since I had no official credibility so to speak and a bunch of shiny papers/diplomas/certifications to impress a potential employer. I decided to go freelance and that's when a row of disappointments began. I spent some time on building myself a few show websites, just to sit in my portfolio and then there was a time to let the world to know about myself and get some clients. I registered my website on several directories, wasted some money on google adWords, spent some time in business forums and went to several business networking breakfasts and I have to say, whether it's my luck or something but I didn't found a single client, however encountered all sorts of imbeciles. Out of all the people I've met during that time at least 10 of them claimed to be web designers, but nothing could be further from the truth, because most of those people had franchises of something like activwebdesign.com and such and they told me that they only work with templates and "automated" tools provided by the franchise, and they proudly called themselves web designers and developers and guess what - they had loads of clients. Whenever I tried to touch a topic like hand-coding, PHP, JavaScript and similar - they would just blink at me with empty face expressions telling that they don't know **** about those things. Most of the people I met on forums and on meetings were doing things like marketing, sales, accounting, SEO and their attitude was like: why would I need custom web design if I can get myself something like Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal and drop a theme on top? They even went ahead as far as speaking about "e-commerce" websites that they've "built" in just a few hours using automated tools. So my question is, what exactly do you have to put in your portfolio, what kind of miracle application so it would attract attention and impress potential clients (majority of which probably with attitude "facebook is my business page"). I thought about coding a CMS from scratch with already built in shopping cart and all that e-commerce website needs, I thought it would be a spark in my portfolio, but then I heard such opinions as "why to reinvent the wheel" that "Joomla + some open cart" is everything that one can need. I thought that such primates should like shiny things and animation, so I spent a week working on a Flash project with some heavy 3D, and after that some jerkoff told me that "it loads too slow", that is 10-20 seconds is too much for him to wait. So WTF? Are real web designers/developers really loosing battle to open source CMS'es and social networking websites? Being said that I would like to add something on a completely different note. I never give up, and if I decided to get the piece of the action and invested loads of time in in - I will get it. There are ways to remind all of those wise-ass clients and template "specialists" of what kind of consequences their ignorance can bring. I remember I was a reckless kid when studying in university, and wherever my and my pals concentrated our attentions - servers cracked. Since then I've developed much more constructive thinking, that usually comes with age, but I didn't forget what I've learned and I have quite a few tricks up my sleeve if I ever need them. So what do you think, is it a good way to attract the clients attention by showing how buggy his website/server is and that load of script-kiddies are just waiting for that kind of info? I mean let's be fair - governments screw as in the ass and make us smile, banks invent the money out of a thin air and enslave us - everyone uses their skills/assets and there is no actual morality in capitalism. So my question is why shouldn't we use our skills to get some respect? So, I'm still looking for some idea for my portfolio, that involves some fancy JavaScript/PHP coding, if you guys have any ideas, you're welcome to share it with me.