Programming oppurtunities

That depends upon your quality and pricing per job. Knowing PHP will help.
Google freelance programmer or freelance designer
You will find a ton of places to connect with.
You may want to start off with a lower wage while building your portfolio IMO

Do you have your own website? You can start with that and use the website to outline your skills or services

First thing you want to do is create a profile at rentacoder, elance, getafreelancer, and guru then LEVERAGE those profiles with your past work experience and references.

You'll get jobs in no time if you offer a fair price. Open an account on the various web development forums and business forums and offer your services there.

Create even a simple website with a contact form so you have somewhere you can send people if not to one of your freelancer profiles.

Then start using a percent of your income for paid advertising on business forums, adwords etc. - there may be a little learning curve with this so make sure you don't spend too much at first.

Eventually you'll be absolutely flooded with work and will be able to pick and choose.

Having a portfolio will definitely help, but it isn't essential. I still don't have a portfolio AFTER 5 YEARS - and it hasn't had a negative impact on my success rate with projects, though it probably has caused me to miss some of the 'bigger' opportunities. What can I say, it's always on the list, but work comes first.

One BIG note though, php is easy to pick up but don't expect to make much with it if you don't have at least 6 months semi-advanced experience.

It will be a better idea to focus on the decent Java projects if you have enough experience, you can make decent money. Apart from that, I'd advise you focus on html/css, photoshop slicing, browser compatibility etc. things like that.

While you're busy working on those projects, start learning php - and you CAN learn by necessity which is what I did when I first started. I took on projects I could understand, then while working on the project, filled the gaps in my knowledge.

Hope that helps.

Damien.

"HTML, DHTML, Java and javascript"???
if java, what frameworks do you know? Learn more frameworks and use them in your projects and then you can earn above $2000.

Here are some:
Wicket, Guice, Spring, Hibernate, OpenJigsaw.

Platform:
EclipseRCP and OSGi

Alright? Never use PHP! (Sorry)