This week a problem developed with one of my Moodle installs which runs courses on The eLearning Site. There was a problem with login and more crucially a problem with people creating new accounts. No new accounts = no new people paying for courses. I was keen to get a solution.The error was this:
—–text start—–
Server error!
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Error message:
Premature end of script headers: signup.php
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 500
courses.theelearningsite.com
Fri May 6 07:43:50 2011
Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7g mod_auth_pgsql/2.0.3
—-end text—-
I am not a programmer so I hit Google with a search. No solution was obvious and people seem to be trying different things, with not much success.
My next port of call was oDesk
. I’ve not used this service before but I’d heard they were good. Creating an account was painless and in under 15 minutes I had a job posting created and live. To give me a feeling of security I wanted to employ someone who had already completed some hours on oDesk and had a high feedback score. I also required good English and skills in PHP and Moodle.
I waited for applicants.
I also needed to validate my credit card which took a couple of days. They take two payments equal to US$10 and you have to tell them what the amounts were. Once validated they pay you the $10 back.
Within 24 hours I got 3 applicants ranging from $12 to $25 and hour. The one I chose was actually the most expensive (if you can call it that) and he said he’d need 1-2 hours. I allocated him 3 for the week.
Sergey Grachyov had my problem sorted in 1:30 hours. Great value.
Now on oDesk you only pay for the hours worked (unless you do a fixed price job posting) and oDesk guarantee this as contractors have to login to oDesk , log what they are doing and oDesk actually takes a screen dump 6 times during the hour. That way you, the employer, can actually see what your employee was working on. They have the option to remove any shots of things like answering a call on Skype and can amend their hours logged accordingly.
Would I use oDesk again. Yep absolutely.
Oh and by the way, Sergey “updated “lib\recaptchalib.php” script, function recaptcha_get_html. Problem with “download_file_content” function, because it never returned a result”.
