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With all the marketing aplomb of basement-coders worldwide, NFTs were named with an acronym that does little to clarify their utility.

You probably know by now that NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token; what is perhaps less clear is what “Fungible” actually means; in this context, it means interchangeable.

Consider an ounce of platinum. That platinum is fungible, meaning it can be exchanged for any other ounce of platinum. Now consider a piece of jewelry made from one ounce of platinum. That jewelry is not interchangeable with any other ounce of platinum; it has the same core materials, but it has unique characteristics that may be artistically valuable, such as shape, or craft. The jewelry is non-fungible.

The letter that actually matters in NFT is T for Token. Tokens are little chunks of a blockchain that is a universally agreed dataset. You don’t need to know how it works any more than you need to understand how a computer processor works; you just need to know it’s in there.

Like any new technology, NFTs are surrounded by propaganda, counter-propaganda, skepticism, evangelism, and Facebook-confusion. In this post, we’ll look at some of the common misconceptions so you can develop an informed opinion.

1. NFTs Are Bad For The Environment

We’ll tackle this one first because it’s the classic argument leveled against anything in the crypto-space, whether Bitcoin or NFTs, and it’s nonsensical.

The root of this myth is that cryptocurrency transactions use vast amounts of electricity, the generation of which is terrible for the environment. The answer is threefold:

Firstly, electricity is used to run computers that maintain a blockchain, such as Ethereum. The blockchain is maintained whether NFTs are minted (registered) or not.

Secondly, NFTs tend to be minted on blockchains like Ethereum that are moving to less resource-intensive models, blockchains like Solana that already have less resource-intensive models, or blockchains like Algorand that are already carbon-neutral.

Lastly, the fact is that electricity is not inherently planet-killing. Renewables like solar and wind are perfectly capable of powering the grid; it’s just that power companies make higher profits by burning fossil fuels. That swanky new electric car you’ve bought so you can drive guilt-free is fuelled with fossil fuels on the power company’s end (and that’s before you consider the damage done getting those minerals out of the ground).

Until the computer you’re using is solar-powered, repairable, and upgradable, anything digital is terrible for the environment; NFTs are as bad, but no more so, than anything digital.

2. NFTs Are Just [Insert Patronizing Economic Metaphor Here]

NFTs, and crypto in general, are frequently referred to as a Ponzi Scheme. In the 1920s, Charles Ponzi duped investors into handing over cash. Returns were paid to early investors with the income from new investors. Early investors made a lot of money, and later investors lost everything.

One of the key characteristics of a Ponzi Scheme is that it’s a confidence trick that presents itself as low-risk. NFTs as an investment are widely understood to be high-risk. Calling NFTs a Ponzi Scheme is an excellent way of letting people know you don’t know what a Ponzi Scheme is.

In the 17th century, the price of tulip bulbs reached astronomical proportions. The Dutch tulip trade was a complex economic investment system that eventually collapsed, thanks in part to a global pandemic. Ever since, Tulpenmanie (Tulip Mania, in English) has been a byword for an economic bubble.

NFTs are frequently linked to Tulip Mania, thanks partly to the prices and the expectation (or hope) that the market will collapse. However, if you drive through the Netherlands today, you’ll see vast fields of tulips. They’re not being grown because they’re worthless.

While demand may fluctuate, it doesn’t fluctuate as much as media hysteria implies. And ultimately, tulips are nice.

3. You Can Buy And Sell NFTs

This is where pedantry plays a role. You cannot buy and sell NFTs; NFTs are the vehicle by which you conduct transactions for digital (or, in some cases, physical) goods and services.

If you have software installed on your computer, you probably have a license key. The license key identifies you as holding certain rights over that software, such as being allowed to use it to produce digital goods of your own. The license key is how the company identifies you as the individual to whom it has sold those rights.

NFTs are license keys for digital goods that are recorded on a blockchain instead of being held in a single database.

4. NFTs Can Be Easily Copied

When I was a kid in the 90s, I would record music off the radio with a tape player. I’d make mix-tapes and give them away. I was, in every literal sense, pirating music. And it wasn’t just me; home-taping kept the cassette industry going for decades past its use-by date. Despite this, the music industry did not collapse.

Art is even easier to copy than music because there’s no risk of a vapid DJ wittering over the intro to I Wanna Be Adored.

On my morning commute, I pass a shop that sells art prints. Around 80% are screen prints of Marilyn Monroe. They are original prints made by an artist and sold for not inconsiderable amounts. Not one of those pieces diminishes the quality, importance, or financial value of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints in New York’s MoMA.

The difference is that MoMA’s Warhols have provenance — they can be tracked to a time and place and authenticated as by Warhol. Precisely the same provenance that NFTs provide digital artists.

5. You Can Get Rich From NFTs

Earning money, potentially a vast amount of money, is one of the main driving factors behind the boom in NFTs.

But the truth is that while it is possible to make a lot of money — some NFTs sell for millions of dollars — most NFTs sell for a modest amount.

If you are an accomplished artist with original ideas, you may make money from selling your art as NFTs. If you are an accomplished trader capable of recognizing quality, you may make money from buying and selling NFTs. However, very few people get rich.

6. NFT Resale Rights Undermine Value

NFTs have many potential uses, but the earliest adoption has been in digital art. The main economic benefit to artists is not just an easy way to sell their art but a widely accepted royalty system in which the original artist receives a commission every time the artwork is resold. It represents the ongoing investment the artist is making by continuing to produce and promote their work.

It might seem a strange way to approach ownership, but resale rights are not new in the art world. In the EU and the UK, the resale rights of artists are legally recognized. In France, the legal rights of the artist or the artist’s descendants to be compensated from the sale of artwork have been established in law for over a century.

Despite high-profile artists like Robert Rauschenberg fighting for resale rights, and legislation in New York and California supporting the concept, resale rights are still not recognized in the US.

NFTs introduce a fairer system that grants the same rights to all artists, that Europeans already enjoy.

7. NFTs Are Worthless

Anything with value, whether physical currency, NFTs, or a block of wood, only has value because two or more people agree it has value.

The most expensive baseball card in the world is reportedly a mint-condition Honus Wagner, priced at $3m. It might be hard to understand why anyone would pay $3m for a piece of cardboard with an image of a 1950s sportsman on it, but apparently, someone would.

All goods, all the things we spend money on, are worth what we agree they are worth. To me, a tulip bulb is worth more than a baseball card, but who knows, perhaps you don’t like tulips.

There are plenty of flaws in the systems that use NFTs, and there are plenty of detractors, but if you want to create and sell artwork and someone wants to buy it from you, NFTs are an excellent way of facilitating that transaction.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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Every year, at this time, blogs like this one like to try and predict what’s going to happen in the year ahead. It’s a way of drawing a line under the archive and starting afresh. A rejuvenation that, as humans, we find life-affirming.

Ten years ago, I would have had high confidence in these predictions — after all I was eventually right about SVG adoption, even if it took a decade. But the last few years have shown that web design is tightly interwoven with the muggle world, and that world is anything but predictable.

So as we look at what might occur in the next year (or five), think of it less as a set of predictions and more as a wishlist.

Last Year’s Predictions

When I write this post every January, I like to keep myself honest by glancing back at the previous year’s predictions to gauge how accurate (or not) my predictions have been.

Last year I predicted the long-term trend for minimalism would end, WordPress would decline, cryptocurrency would go mainstream, and then hedged my bets by saying we’d make both more and fewer video calls.

Gradients, maximalism, and the nineties revival pulled us away from minimalism. It’s still popular, just not as dominant.

WordPress is still the biggest CMS in the world and will continue to be for some time. But the relentless grind of no-code site builders at the low end, and being outperformed by better CMS at the high end, mean that WordPress has passed its peak.

Over-inflated predictions for BitCoin reaching $100k by December 2021 turned out to be a damp squib. In the end, Bitcoin only tripled in value in 2021. However, with micro-tipping and major tech companies moving into the arena, it’s clear digital currency arrived in the public consciousness in 2021.

And how could I be wrong about more but also fewer video calls? So I’m calling that my first clean sweep ever. With that heady boast, let’s take a look at the next twelve months.

What Not to Expect in 2022

Do not expect the Metaverse to be significant in anything but marketing speak. Yes, the hardware is slowly becoming more available, but the Metaverse in 2022 is like playing an MMORPG on PS5: theoretically, great fun, until you discover that absolutely none of your friends can get their hands on a console.

Ignore the blog posts predicting a noughties-era retro trend. All those writers have done is looked at the nineties-era trend and added a decade. Fashions aren’t mathematical; they’re poetic. Retro happens when people find a period that rhymes with present-day hopes and fears. After the last couple of years, if we revisit a decade, it’s likely to be the late-forties.

Finally, don’t expect seismic change. Material design, parallax scrolling, and jQuery are still with us and are still valid choices under the right circumstances. Trends aren’t neat; they don’t start in January and conclude in December.

5 Web Design Predictions for 2022

Predictions tend to be self-fulfilling. So we’ve limited ourselves to five trends that we believe are either positive or, at worst harmless. Of course, there are no guarantees, but if these come to pass, we’ll be in good shape for 2023.

1. The Blockchain is Coming

Underpinning the cryptocurrency industry are blockchains. In simple terms, they’re a set of data that can be appended to but can’t be edited or deleted. Think of it as version control for data.

As with most technology, the first wave has been a way to make a fast buck. However, the exciting development is blockchain technology itself and the transformative nature of the approach. For example, Médecins Sans Frontières reportedly stores refugees’ medical records on the blockchain.

Imagine the Internet as a set of data, editable for a micro-fee, and freely accessed by anyone anywhere. Instead of millions of sites, a single, secure, autonomous source of truth. Someone somewhere’s working on it.

2. Positivity & Playfulness & A11y

Even before world events descended into an endless tirade of grim news, time was running out for dull, corporate, geometric sans-serif design.

We added gradients, we added personality, we embraced humor. And contrary to the established business logic, we still make money. Over the past few years, there have been extraordinary efforts by designers and developers to examine, test, and champion accessibility, and thanks to them, inclusive design is no longer reliant on the lowest common denominator.

In 2022 you can get experimental without obstructing 10%+ of your users.

3. Everything Green

Green is a fascinating color, the primary that isn’t (except in RGB, when it is).

Green has the same visual weight as blue, is substantially more flexible, and yet to date, has been radically underutilized in digital design.

Green has a prominent cultural association with the environment. At a time when tech companies are desperate to emphasize their ethical credentials, marketing companies will inevitably begin promoting a brand color shift to green as a quick fix for all those dumped chemicals, strip mines, and plastic-filled seas.

We’ve already seen earthy hues acquire popular appeal. At the other end of the vibrancy scale, neons are popular. Green spans both approaches with everything from calm sages to acidic neons.

In 2022, if you’re looking for a color to capture the moment, look to green.

4. Hero Text

A picture is supposed to be worth 1000 words, although I’m not sure anyone has actually tried to measure it. The problem is that sites increasingly rely on stock images, so the 1000 words that we’re getting may or may not accurately reflect 100% of our message.

In 2022, a handful of well-chosen words will be worth more than an image, with hero images taking a back seat to large hero text. This is aided by a number of minor trends, the most notable of which is the willingness of businesses to look beyond the geometric sans-serif to a more expressive form of typography.

Reading through the prediction posts on sites other than this, almost everyone agrees on large hero text replacing images, which virtually guarantees it won’t happen. Still, at the start of 2022, this seems to be the direction we’re taking.

5. Bring the Noise

One of the unexpected consequences of the past couple of years has been a renewed connection with nature. The effortless complexity in nature is endlessly engaging.

We’ve already begun to popularise gradients — there are no flat colors in nature — and the next logical step is the addition of noise.

In visual terms, noise is the grainy texture that sits so beautifully in vector illustrations. Noise has dipped in and out of trends for years, hampered a little by the leap in file size it creates. However, with WebP and Avif file types, noise is now usable on production sites.

Designing in 2022, when in doubt, throw some noise at it.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

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Ready to take your business online but not sure where to start? It’s a surprisingly simple process, made all the easier by the tagDiv Newspaper theme that can shoulder the burden of code, leaving you to be creative.

Professional web designers normally begin with broad brushstrokes, roughly hewing a site, before finessing on the finer details; that’s exactly what tagDiv’s Newspaper theme lets you do, with innovative tools and a huge selection of pre-built options to choose from.

What is the Newspaper Theme?

Newspaper is the best-selling magazine theme from tagDiv. In constant development over the last twelve years, it’s been used to create world-beating sites for clients as diverse and demanding as United Nations, ShareAmerica, The Rackspace Blog, Bitcoin News, Uber Engineering, and Tech Explorist.

As the name implies, the Newspaper theme is primarily a magazine or blog theme, but you can use it for any kind of site, in any type of industry.

Packed with intuitive features that make personal web development not just possible but enjoyable, it will have your site ready to launch in no time.

It is fully compatible with Gutenberg, WordPress’ drag-n-drop site builder; it also comes with its own WYSIWYG, tagDiv Composer. All the sites built in Newspaper are fully flexible, responsive, mobile-friendly, and retina-ready. Newspaper is even fully integrated with WooCommerce so that you can transform your magazine site into a fully-featured ecommerce store.

Newspaper has been carefully coded to make the most of the upcoming Core Web Vitals update from Google, so your new site will be well-placed to rank highly on search engines.

Now that you know a little about the background of the Newspaper theme let’s look at how we can use it to build a WordPress site.

Pre-Built Websites

Sometimes it’s not just your coding skills but your design skills that are lacking; you know what kind of site that you want, you’re just hazy on the details.

This is where tagDiv’s Newspaper theme comes into its own. With a single click, you can install an entire pre-built website. And the process is so fast and convenient that you can try out as many as you like and pick the one that matches your vision.

You can even import a whole ton of pre-written content for testing the sites out, so you can see how it will look with your content without spending hours typing or copying and pasting text out of a Word doc.

There are 120 different designs covering all kinds of different industries. This means no matter what kind of site you’re building, one click, and you’re ready to go live.

Cloud Library

One step up from a full pre-built website is tagDiv’s Cloud Library. If you’ve installed one of the pre-built websites, this is probably where you want to go next.

The Cloud Library is a collection of 1600 different design elements that can be mixed and matched with live-editing to fast-track your site creation. You’ll find content blocks like headers, footers, testimonials, banners, and featured items. You can mix-n-match them however you please to create the site of your dreams.

Putting the “Cloud” into the Cloud Library are tagDiv’s servers, storing the code for each of these elements, so your installation only needs to load the code you actually use. This provides a huge boost in performance.

Composer

Lastly, the Newspaper theme provides tagDiv Composer, a specialist WordPress builder — like Gutenberg — that allows you to customize your website with absolutely no coding skills whatsoever. It’s a powerful yet simple-to-use tool that allows you to edit the elements of the Cloud Library and adapt them to your own purposes.

With Composer, you can create your own headers, footers, banners, text blocks, and more without any of the limitations of cookie-cutter design.

tagDiv Composer gives you the ultimate control over your site. You’ll find all the essential elements you need, from text and buttons to images and videos. All you have to do is drag and drop them into place.

Building a Site With tagDiv Newspaper Theme

As you can see that the fastest way to an engaging and original website is, to begin with, a pre-built site, then add the different blocks of code you want from the Cloud Library, and finally customize them with the Composer.

To make this possible, tagDiv has brought together experts from multiple disciplines, including brand strategy, project management, and web development.

It’s a slick system for quickly publishing high-quality sites that are unique to you and your business. Trusted by more than 130,000 customers worldwide, the Newspaper has earned tagDiv the status of Power Elite Author on ThemeForest and Top Author on Envato.

The Newspaper theme costs just $59, which includes six months of support from tagDiv, but for just $17.63, you can extend support to 12 months for added peace of mind.

tagDiv Newspaper is the simplest way for you to take your business online using WordPress.

 

[— This is a sponsored post on behalf of tagDiv —]

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Every digital aspect comes with a security risk if not handled properly. With billions of people using online and digital technologies worldwide, there are ample opportunities for hackers to break the security wall and create unrest all around. Cybersecurity news has become too frequent these days. We see bitcoin mining, credit card credential stealing, injecting malicious code into the systems, stealing confidential data, etc. In today’s digital world, it is not just about having speed, reaching your customers quickly, easy setup, mind-blowing features, etc., but rather, it is about how safe or secure your systems, data, or features are.

What is Cybersecurity?

The approach and practice of securing electronic data, networks, computer systems, and any form of digital infrastructure from malicious attacks is known as Cybersecurity. Banks, educational institutions, tech companies, government agencies, publishing media houses, hospitals, and every sector invest in cybersecurity infrastructure to protect their customer data, secrets, and business intelligence from attackers.

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The start of the year is always a good time to reassess priorities and consider new approaches, but 2021 is more of a reset than we expected this time last year. 2020 is unlikely to go down in anyone’s autobiography as the best year of their life, but it has done something positive: it’s prepared the ground for rapid change in the next 12 months.

More than any other year in our lifetimes, 2021 is set to be revolutionary, with emerging trends that will last well into the new decade. Here’s what we think you can look forward to around the next corner.

1. The End of Minimalism

Minimalism has been the de facto approach to web design for the last decade because it works.

But design reflects the zeitgeist. Where minimalism once felt clean and fresh, it’s starting to feel dull and uninspired. There have been a few false-starts breaking out of the long-term trend, but thanks to the pandemic, 2021 will be the year minimalism finally folds — at least for a while.

Prior to coronavirus-mandated lockdowns worldwide, there were already signs of a more vibrant, more decorative, more joyful approach to design. Simple typefaces have been replaced with more decorative examples — faces that use ink-traps to fake 3D effects are surprisingly popular.

trends are cyclical, and the wheel always turns

One of the biggest aspects of this blossoming trend is the move away from Material Design-style flat color not just to gradients but to multi-color gradients and even animated gradients. Even Apple, the last bastion of the clean white-box approach, jumped on the gradient bandwagon with its Big Sur branding.

One of the few things COVID-19 hasn’t slowed is the adoption of new web technology, and CSS, in particular, has had some major developments in the last year. CSS Grid is now a practical technology, and our ability to code standards-compliant designs that aren’t dependent on hierarchical boxes is greatly enhanced.

After more than a year of pretty grim news for most people, much of the world will be vaccinated over the next twelve months, and life will rapidly return to normal. The last global crisis on this scale was the 1918 influenza pandemic, and it led directly to the decade known as the Roaring Twenties.

Minimalism was already dipping in popularity — trends are cyclical, and the wheel always turns — but lockdown, or perhaps more precisely the end of lockdown, is the catalyst for significant change.

2. The Decline of WordPress

In Autumn 2020, something entirely unexpected happened: The W3C announced the platform its new web presence would be built on, and WordPress — the previous choice of the web’s steering committee — didn’t even make the list of finalists.

Due to accessibility concerns, the W3C development team opted to migrate away from WordPress to Craft CMS. The decision was met with a mixture of glee and outrage. But whether you agree with the decision or not, it’s hard to see it as anything other than yet another symptom of WordPress’ decline.

WordPress faces a triple threat: there are web builders that do an adequate job for low-end web projects; there are newer rivals like Craft that outperform WordPress as a CMS; there’s a growing interest in alternate approaches, like Jamstack.

So will it all be over for WordPress in 2021? Not even close. There are myriad reasons WordPress will continue to be the choice of designers and developers for years to come. Tens of thousands of professionals worldwide have invested their whole careers in WordPress; there are millions of themes, plugins, templates, and build processes that are tightly woven into the WordPress ecosystem. What’s more, there are millions of sites with substantial content archives powered by WordPress [WebDesignerDepot is one such site].

WordPress reportedly powers approximately 37% of the web, and it will still be the dominant CMS in 2022. But it’s unlikely to grow beyond that 37%, and by 2030 its market share will be in rapid contraction.

2020 was the high-tide mark for WordPress

But for all its faults — and it’s undeniable that WordPress is full of faults — WordPress is the best of the web; it has given a voice to millions of people, launched countless careers, and empowered entrepreneurship worldwide.

2020 was the high-tide mark for WordPress, but it’s not an extinction-level event — even the much-maligned Flash, which was killed dead in a matter of months by the first generation iPhone, limped on until a few weeks ago.

WordPress will have to find a niche and accept a smaller market share; in doing so, it will address the single biggest complaint that anyone has about WordPress: that it’s trying to do too much.

WordPress is one of the great success stories of the web. In a decade, it may have to settle for powering just 10% of the web — a level of failure most of its rivals can only dream of.

3. The Digital Currency Explosion

2021 is undoubtedly the year that cryptocurrency goes mainstream. In 2020 Bitcoin grew by almost 400%; currently valued at around $35k, conservative predictions for a December 2021 valuation are $100k, with five-year predictions as high as $1m. And Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency; the value of developer-friendly Ether has jumped by more than 50% in the first few weeks of 2021.

In the US, the incoming Biden administration is preparing a multi-trillion dollar relief package, which many believe young Americans will invest in cryptocurrency. Perhaps more importantly, large investment banks are now pumping hundreds of millions in digital currencies. PayPal and Visa are both in the advanced stages of adopting blockchain technology.

The biggest threat to the new digital economy is the volatility of cryptocurrency. You cannot price services in XRP if XRP’s dollar price could crash at any time — as it did a few weeks ago.

And so there are two routes in which this trend will unfold for ecommerce. Either pricing will remain in dollars, and the equivalent price in various cryptocurrencies will be calculated in real-time. Or, transactions will make use of stablecoins like Tether that are tied to the value of the US dollar.

Cryptocurrency is the latest gold-rush, and whether you think it’s the chance of a lifetime or yet another Ponzi scheme, it will become increasingly high-profile in ecommerce throughout 2021.

4. No More Video Calls and also More Video Calls

2020 was the year of Zoom. Its growth from bit-player to overtaking Skype is a material lesson for entrepreneurs that every obstacle is an opportunity.

every obstacle is an opportunity

Over the last year, we’ve discovered two things: meetings are more creative in person, and office costs are significantly reduced when staff work remotely.

There’s going to be a shift in the business landscape this year. Remote working will continue to be normal for years to come as businesses enjoy rent savings. Video calls will still be common for quick update meetings. But expect to travel to physical meeting places periodically for in-depth strategic planning.

Expect to see major cities with deserted office buildings and a rapid expansion of co-working spaces, especially those with meeting spaces — if WeWork can hold on a little longer, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

As a web professional, you’re in a unique position to thrive in the new business world, even more so if you’re a freelancer. Remember, if you’re working onsite, be mindful of your physical health, and if you’re working remotely, be mindful of your mental health.

What Do You Think?

No one saw 2020 coming. Sometimes world events are outwith our control, and we have to hang on and hope it gets better. It’s been a tough 12 months, and the truth is we’re not through it yet.

But the 2020 coronavirus pandemic is the first pandemic in human history that we’ve had the technology to shorten.

2021 offers the opportunity for enormous change. Will designers look for new, more decorative approaches? Will we replace our technology stack? Will you be billing clients in Ether this year? Will you suffer the misery of a packed evening commute ever again?

 

 

Featured image via Unsplash

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What an extraordinary year 2020 has been for the news! From the ongoing coronavirus crisis, to a turbulent US election, to the unrelenting march of Bitcoin, this year like no other we’ve been glued to our phones micro-analyzing every tidbit of news.

Which makes this the perfect time for mediastack, an awesome REST API that allows you to embed a customizable news feed, sourced from the world’s top news agencies, and updated by the minute, right on your site.

Integrating Global News with Your Site

News is the beating pulse of so many global industries. From political decisions that affect stock prices, to natural disasters that interrupt goods and services, to the whims of celebrities who overnight transform brands from unknown to must-have.

Whether you’re building a site for a non-profit in Louisiana that cares deeply about both Washington politics, and hurricanes in the Caribbean; or you’re building an app for a golf course in Halkidiki that’s focused on both local news, and golf around the world; delivering real-time news content to those users elevates UX.

Tightly integrating the news with your site makes it a hub for users hungry for that very news. The only limit is your creativity.

Display Up-to-Date News on Your Site

When news breaks around the world the top networks scramble to catch up; they simply can’t maintain correspondents in every town and city in the world, and so they rely on affiliates. mediastack pulls in news from over 7,500 different sources in over 50 countries worldwide, giving you access to exactly the same affiliates frequently used by big news organizations like CNN, MSNBC, BBC, or ABC.

When it’s one of the big players in news that breaks a story first, mediastack still has you covered because as will as covering smaller, lesser-known sources mediastack delivers real-time news from CBS, Sky News, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, USA Today, and a host of trusted names across the industry.

If your site targets users that are only interested in certain types of story — like sports, or Hollywood celebrities — then you can even pull in stories from ESPN, TMZ, or Fox News.

Get Started Quickly with mediastack

Getting started with mediastack couldn’t be simpler, and there’s a free plan that’s more than enough to prototype your project.

Full documentation is provided with code examples for PHP, Python, jQuery, Go, and Ruby. To start integrating all you need to do is register for a free access key.

Once you have your free access key, you connect to the API, then customize the results you receive with simple parameters. You can specify the types of news, the precise sources (including omitting sources), languages, countries, and most importantly your keywords.

For example here’s how you’d request science news from CNN, but not TMZ:

https://api.mediastack.com/v1/news
?access_key=[ INSERT YOUR ACCESS KEY HERE ]
&categories=science
&sources=cnn,-tmz

Let’s say you want to display Spanish language crypto news on your site, it couldn’t be easier:

https://api.mediastack.com/v1/news
?access_key=[ INSERT YOUR ACCESS KEY HERE ]
&categories=business,technology
&languages=es
&search=crypto,bitcoin,btc,xrp,ripple,etherium,altcoin

The API sends back simple JSON data that’s easy to run through. Each news item includes the author, title, description, url, source, image, category, language, country, and a published_at timestamp that records when the story was posted.

Once the feed is setup, sit back and relax. It’s all automated from now on.

The Best Source of News for Your Website

mediastack is delivered by apilayer, quite rightly one of the most trusted names in APIs, and is capable of handling millions of requests simultaneously.

Fast, updated by the minute, highly customizable, reliable, and sourced from the biggest names in the news industry, mediastack is an amazing API.

There’s a free-forever plan that allows you to use the API without charge, for up to 500 API calls per month, that’s perfect for trying it out.

For commercial use, plans start at just $19.99/month, and can handle up to 250,000 calls per month. Commercial plans also include HTTPS encryption, live news delivery, access to historical data, and — should you ever need it — technical support.

Head over to mediastack today, to prepare your site for whatever events 2021 throws at us.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of mediastack –]

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Eliminate the middleman to boost security! A promise made by blockchain is already nailing the card payment industry. Ever since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2009, the number of blockchain wallets increased to approximately 42 million users in September end 2019, as per Statista.

Blockchain, the underlying technology is poised to disrupt every industry.

Source de l’article sur DZONE