song’s title is Pyramid by Charice Pempengco

As part of Marikina City, Optimind is grateful for not being affected by the flooding caused by typhoon Ondoy. We are helping out Ondoy victims in Marikina and Cainta area. We have toured around evacuation centers yesterday to give out food and water and found out that they are in need of clothing. For anyone interested to help, please text 09178000171 or 09228975841. We will pick up clothing donations from the following area and bring them to evacuation centers around Marikina and Cainta:

• Katipunan
• Banawe
• Cubao
• Libis
• Caloocan
• Novaliches
• Quezon Avenue
• Timog Ave
• West Ave.
• E. Rodriguez
• Greenhills
• Horshoe
• Tandang Sora
• Congressional
• Mindanao Ave.
• Visayas Ave.

Here are photos of Ondoy aftermath near our office:

local parish

road that most of our employees take to get to
marcos highway from riverbanks

sm marikina access to parking

sm marikina driveway

people covered with mud became common
because of ondoy

local park

car swiped by flood and now tilting on a post
just in front of the firehouse near the city hall

Ondoy’s Trail of Fury from Glenn Omanio on Vimeo.

In the past few months, using frameworks such as CodeIngiter and CakePHP has helped us meet our deadlines and build better web applications. Here are some of the benefits we’ve received by using frameworks:

• cleaner code
• easier to distribute programming tasks to different programmers
• faster development cycle
• easier to debug
• presentation can be changed without changing the logic (actual program/process)
• more scalable

In a web design business, using an online project management tool is essential to keep at least 90% of your projects on schedule.

In 2007, we signed up on Basecamp and we were really happy with it. But then again, in exchange for the fast bandwidth and maintenance-free app, you get a limit on the space and the no. of projects. With a growing list of clients and ongoing projects, we needed to live away from the limit and purchased ActiveCollab.

We have been using AC for a few months now. Although it was a bit harder to learn, we have been very happy with it. There are a lot more things that you can do with AC as compared with Basecamp, namely:

1. Integrated Invoicing
2. SVN repository
3. Unlimited projects
4. Automated backup module
5. document management module
6. burn down chart module (available for a small fee)

If you just need a quick way to manage your projects, I suggest you use basecamp. But if you have more complex requirements like what we have, you better purchase ActiveCollab

Last weekend, we got a serious case of a client’s website getting an iframe injection. iFrame injections started last year, when a Russian anti-virus company spread a virus that injects hidden frames inside websites to advertise their anti-virus software. Nowadays, iframe injections are being used by SEO companies to forward traffic and leak link juice from a high-PR website.

Just last year, major US websites like Wal-mart, USA today, etc. were hit by this virus.

Based on our research, iframe injections are caused by workstations infected by worms that injects these iframe source to index.php or index.html. Some tips to avoid this serious infection are:

• update ftp password every month or update it everytime you upload a file just to make sure;
• invest on a good anti-virus software and make sure its always updated;
• never save your passwords on your computer (ftp software, e-mail, instant messaging, browser).

Our 2-day outing started at 5am last Saturday. Everyone was excited about it that some of us stayed awake since Friday night . Here are some pics from our anilao trip:

Our favorite is Jane and Jonathan’s version of Titanic:

mang jack and aling rosa on a ship wreck, haha

Too bad, Annie, Eric, Jebb and Nancy missed this event! Hopefully, our next event (team building) would include flying an Ultralight.

Last night, I updated my pesentation about the New Trends in Search Optimization for the Social Networking and eBusiness Conference. It is now uploaded here for your viewing. The copy on the CD given actually has lesser slides than this one.

Also, you may now download the free Do-It-Yourself SEO ebook here.

There is an upcoming e-business and social networking conference where our company’s president will be speaking at. The details of the conference can be found here.

With this, we decided to change the look of our blog, to prepare and work on our company’s image. We’re still fixing some minor things - like the logo on top that doesn’t really work with the colors of this blog :). Some other things we did together with the design upgrade are:

• Upgrade to the latest wordpress
• Installed some SEO plug-ins (thanks to our SEO Unit Head, Annie, for notifying us that our blog didn’t have an XML sitemap)
• Installed Hello Dolly plug-in even though it doesn’t make sense. While typing this post, hello dolly is displaying “Golly. gee fellas”
• Updated the footer links with keywords that links to our landing pages

We hope that you’re enjoying the upgrade for our blog’s design. More great things to come

Update 4/28/2009:

Conference was successful, just found an AVP of it uploaded:

Today, April 1, 2009, Optimind is officialy 7 years old! You can see the site we used when we started in April 1, 2002 here.

Some pics from our organization development workshop which was held last March 27 at Podium in Ortigas can be found here.