Taxes
Just recently I filed my taxes for 2011. A few days late, but no worse for the wear. But, Here’s the exciting thing… 2011 was the first year was able to survive on 100% freelance income! It’s been a hard road, for sure! But it feels good to have made it over this hurdle.
A quick comparison of my income over time shows a steady increase, as I transitioned from the rat race to the full-time freelancing. here’s a quick breakdown:
| Year as a freelancer | Freelance Income |
| 1 | approx. $3,000.00 |
| 2 | approx. $6,500.000 |
| 3 | approx. $23,000.000 |
Now, those numbers are before taxes and business expenses, which also increase over time, but still quite promising. This year I’m hoping to reach $40,000. I got off to a rough start, as the first two months of 2012 were quite slow. But, It’s picking up and I think I might be able to hit that goal.
As with any business, it’s about slow, methodical, sustainable growth.
The challenge now is, I have to continue to grow by increasing profits, decreasing time spent, and diversifying my income streams and assets. That’s a whole other post though.
Best of luck to any and everyone who takes the leap and sets out to escape the wheel.. I know I’m glad I did. Even on days I hate this gig, lol.
Christopher L. VaughanOwner/Operator
Vaughan Freelance Svcs
I’m top 2% …yeah, I rock!
It’s been while since I added a blog post. Mostly because I haven’t really had time. I’ve been….. working! lol
Anyway, I checked the standings today, and I am ranked in the top 2% of my field on elance, which is pretty awesome. Work has become much more regular, and I rarely bid on projects anymore. In fact, in the last thirty days I’ve probably bid on maybe 4, total. My income is steadily increasing and I have made some great connections for outsourcing my overflow. Business is good! My personal life is good too, but I wont go into that here 
Look for some new articles in the next few weeks!
Update: for the last six months i’ve been in the top 1%
Peace & Love Beautiful People!
Christopher L. VaughanOwner/Operator
Vaughan Freelance Svcs
testing php inside a post
This post uses an external calculator I created for a client. I’m testing the wordpress php plugin
Calculate your savings Today!
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How much is a pack of cigarettes? |
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How many packs to you smoke a day? |
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Owner/Operator
Vaughan Freelance Svcs
Building Dynamic Queries
When working with a database, you’ll sometimes find yourself in a situation where you don’t actually know what the query will consist of beforehand. One situation where I encountered this was on www.bleggierealestate.com. I was building a property search system and the query really needed to be dynamic, otherwise I’d be sending a bunch of junk info to the server, and producing incorrect results. So, I turned to dynamic querying.
What a dynamic query is, is basically a search string that is dependent on user input. What you’ll be doing is building your query in parts. For our example, we’ll be searching for a person in a database with specific attributes.
let’s say our form has five fields:
- height
- weight
- age
- eye-color
- hair color
We’ll start the query off like this:
$query = "Select * from people where ";
Now that we have the beginning of the query the next thing we have to do is decide which options the person used to seach, and build the query accordingly:
if (isset($_POST['height'])){
$query .= "height='". $_POST['height'] . "' AND ";
}
if (isset($_POST['weight'])){
$query .= "weight='". $_POST['weight'] . "' AND ";
}
if (isset($_POST['age'])){
$query .= "age='". $_POST['age'] . "' AND ";
}
if (isset($_POST['eye-color'])){
$query .= "eyecolor='". $_POST['eye-color'] . "' AND ";
}
if (isset($_POST['haircolor'])){
$query .= "haircolor='". $_POST['haircolor'] . "' AND ";
}
All we did there was use some if statements to see which variables were set, and add which ever ones were set to the query (not the “.=” that appends to the end of the variable instead of overwriting it).
After our if statements we are complete, we have built our query and we can execute it like normal:
$result = MySQL_query($query);
And there you have it… I hardly work a project without having to use this, these days. It’s a great tool!
Peace & Love
Christopher L. VaughanOwner/Operator
Vaughan Freelance Svcs
