I had been trying to get my individual tax id from IRS since January because the company i’m working for told me that I needed it in order to get full payments, otherwise they had to withhold 30% of my monthly fees according to IRS regulation. People said it would be a long process, and they are right!

After months exchanging emails with a tax consultant, getting the required papers from the company & from SSA office in the US embassy in Manila, sending my passport to a friend in the US to get a notarized copy, etc., I received a letter from IRS saying that my application was rejected because my passport copy was not properly notarized. I was puzzled so I asked my manager in the US to call IRS to get a clarification. After about an hour of getting transferred from one IRS agent to another (it would cost me a serious amount of $ if I called them myself), he finally got to talk to someone who could answer our inquiry. The answer is … I don’t need/qualify for ITIN because I perform my work in Indonesia, not in the US. The agent referred to this IRS publication, specifically the part that reads:

Services performed outside the United States. Compensation paid to a nonresident alien (other than a resident of Puerto Rico, discussed later) for services performed outside the United States is not considered wages and is not subject to withholding.

So if you’re working remotely for a US company and the company asks for your ITIN, show them the publication.

So you have done a flash website for your client. You put all the necessary files on your server for demoing your hard work to them. They like it very much and think that you’re the best coder out there.

Now they want your help to set up a server for the website too because it is the first website they ever had and they don’t have a clue on how and where to host their shiny, brand new website. They are not really tech-savvy so telling them to google for web hosts won’t do any good for them. They might even get confused by thousands of web hosting sites Google gives them. Of course, you can go to authoritative forums like webhostingtalk.com to help them find a good host but it’s going to cost you some time. Oh and the client think that you can do this for free because you’re a rock star coder and you can do it in just a few minutes.

I had been in the same situation many times. The best places for me and my clients to look for solid webhosts and compare them easily are webhosting review sites. A review site that I just recently found is Web Hosting Search. This review site provides quick links to find hosts along with their ratings by the operating systems. So if your client wants Mac, you can just go to Mac Web Hosting or Windows Web Hosting if they want Windows.

Webhostingsearch is more than just a review site. It also contains lots of useful informations for people who don’t know anything about web hosting or the web in general. So your client will not only be able to choose a web host that fits their site’s requirements and their budget but they can also learn a few things about the web like how to set up a website, what web hosting is all about, etc. So whether it is a Mac Web Hosting or a Windows Web Hosting, they have it!

So, by directing your client to Webhostingsearch, you not only save your time and theirs but also help them to learn more about the web.

Good luck!

Minggu lalu ada promo gila di O’reilly. 1 ebook, judul apapun, diobral $10. Jadi deh beli 4 ebook.

Lucunya karena promo ini server mereka overloaded jadi ada order yg ga langsung muncul di account. Yang muncul juga ga bisa diunduh.

O’Reilly ebooks

Lumayan, $40 dapet 4 buku. Kalo ga pas promo, harga totalnya bisa lebih dari $100.

Someone/something hijacked my gmail account and sent out a nonsense email to a bunch of my contacts.

You’re doing a great job protecting your customers, Google.

That’s not my IP address!

Soooo I’ve had enough of all the hassles in writing posts that had lots of sourcecodes to show. While TxP is really good cms, lean and fast, writing such posts was really a pain in the butt . Textile kept messing things up so I had to disable it and write my posts in raw HTML.  I know there are plugins to help me show formatted sourcecode but none was good enough for me.

Also, there’s no“preview mode” that allows me to see how my draft would look on my site without actually publishing it, so each time I wanted to preview my post, I had to publish it, view it on my site, and if something went wrong, set the post back to draft, tweak the HTML, published it again … over and over until it looked good.

I had been using TxP for 2.5 years or so. It’s time to say goodbye and switch over to something that may suit me better, WordPress.

If you’re looking for articles I posted on my old blog, please visit old.masputih.com.