Articles

Do you ever feel overworked and underpaid as a freelancer or business owner? I know I have. For many, the primary cause is thinking about your business in the short term rather than the long term. Think about a freelancer who takes smaller, quick paying jobs today instead of leaving time to improve their business so they can get bigger jobs later. It becomes almost like a cycle: they can’t get out of those small paying jobs that just barely pay the bills. To break this cycle, you need to start thinking of your business in the long term. Instead […]

Live interaction with users on your site is a great way to add new functionality that is engaging for your visitors. To be truly live, however, the server needs to correspond with the browser or client directly. Luckily there is a new way to do this using WebSockets, a protocol that allows that direct connection. You can use these instant interactions for administrative purposes, like to show how many visitors are currently viewing your site, and what page they are on. Traditionally, a client communicates with the server by getting or pushing data to it, but what if the server […]

Ah, bitcoin, the totally virtual, decentralized cryptocurrency that nobody really understands (though The Economist comes pretty close). Here’s the basic idea: bitcoin started off in 2009 when created by a mysterious person named Satoshi Nakamoto. This name, however, is just a pseudonym—many have tried to guess at the real identity of Mr. Satoshi but so far there’s been no confirmation. A bitcoin is created when a computer in the P2P coin network accomplishes a certain mathematical task—this process is called mining bitcoins. However, there’s a limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created. The system was designed […]