I found out this morning (via a board I read via Twitter) that my colo is down. Luckily for me, my sysadmin was already aware of it, so any customer complaints I might get will be handled effectively. But of course, since the servers are down, I can't get my email or work on the sites, or even fully finish some articles for this site. So what did I do? I started browsing the Web, of course. :-) And the first thing I came upon was Why Freelancing is Awesome (Via Freelance Folder.) And I have to say I completely agree. Freelancing is awesome. Yes, there are some great facts about freelancing.

I think one of the things I like best about freelancing is that I can set my own hours. Yes, chances are you have today off, and here I am working. But chances are also good that when you go into your job, you work for 8-10 hours. A long day for me is around 5 hours. Plus, if I want to work at 11pm today and then 6am tomorrow, I can. (Trust me, you probably won't see me online at either of those times...) What do You Like Best About Freelancing?

Indenting lists is one of those frustrating aspects of the browser wars. Browsers like Opera and IE give the UL or OL element some left margin, while browsers like Firefox and Safari give the UL or OL element some left padding. So, when you're testing your Web pages in one browser or another, it can be very frustrating to change the margins of your UL and have Firefox ignore you. But with CSS you can learn to indent lists and have your changes look the same in most browsers.

More About Indenting Lists

• Indenting Lists
• Styling Lists with CSS
• Set Styles for Your Lists With the CSS list-style Property
• What is an HTML List?

Well, I forgot to do this yesterday. Oops. I hope those of you who were hoping for the monthly pagerank bump aren't disappointed that I'm late.

What Are People Commenting On?

Comments shot up again in June with 102 comments (not counting a few spam comments that got through).

The most commented on posts were:

• Poll: How Fast is Your Web Design Internet Connection
• Poll: Do You Use PDFs on Your Web Pages?
• Are You Still Determined to Write Flash Websites?
• A New Tool for Testing Browsers: BrowserLab from Adobe (including a comment from the BrowserLab Project Manager)
• Do You Include a Copyright Notice?

The most prolific commenters were:

• Alexander
• Aliester
• Jon Stringer

Thanks for all the great comments!

If you're wondering why you're not on this list - I sort by email address, so if you enter different email addresses every time I won't know you're the same person. Also, I try to answer every comment personally, so if you posted a comment and I didn't reply, then I may not have seen it to rank it.

We Also Talked About

17 people provided feedback on which was better Dreamweaver, Drupal, or WordPress and 13 explained why they did or did not resell hosting. I haven't heard from many people about what weblog software they use or your favorite link checkers, favicons, and graphics editors.

In the Forums

There were 124 new posts to the Web Design forum in June, from 272 visitors. The most prolific posters included:

• Dean
• Prtha
• YanKiwi
• DavidChildress
• computergeek101234

There were 79 new posts in the HTML/XML forum in June, from 132 visitors. The most prolific posters included:

• hemone
• jeemo
• YanKiwi
• GouriB

Thanks for your help and comments in the forums.

Did You Miss Some of These Articles?

Some of the more popular new articles in June included:

• HTML Examples
• Dreamweaver vs. Drupal vs. WordPress
• Best Practices for Using PDFs on Web Pages
• Positioning - Positioning Web Page Layouts - Learn CSS Positioning

Stay up-to-date get the latest articles as an RSS feed.

I was reading Almighty Link today, and the first article is about human placed ads that are essentially text ads at the top of blog posts. They would get caught by the RSS readers and thus seen by people that wouldn't otherwise see the ads on your site. But there are some questions. Here are my thoughts: Read more...

Getting people to come visit your Web pages can be difficult, but social media provides more outlets for us to find people of like mind and present your content to them. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other social media sites that I didn't list on this poll. If you use one even semi-regularly to promote your website or Web pages, let us know what it is in the comments of this post. Don't forget to include a URL so that we can check it out. Where do you promote your Web pages?

I received a response to my question about using Flash today that read:

I would just like to comment about "congratulations you have just won our hourly prize" animated advert. I know it may not be flash but it is so annoying that even if I wanted to buy the product I would deliberately go elsewhere to buy it! I wouldn't be surprised if it caused an epileptic fit in those prone to such ailments. On a site that promotes good design why does about.com do it?

Unfortunately, I can't print it in the location it was submitted (as it doesn't answer the question) and I can't do anything about the question either (because I don't control the design or the ads on this site).

Have you ever done that? In other words, have you felt frustrated by something and found the first text field you could find and entered your complaint there? As a Web designer and webmaster since 1995, I can tell you that many people do. Unfortunately, most of the time, entering a complaint like that will just get your message deleted. Some companies try to forward them on to the right places, but most are just too busy.

If you design forms for your websites you need to realize that more than just spammers will fill up your mailboxes with answers you can't use. Do you have techniques you use to get people to fill out forms so that they get the help they need?

Read more...

One of the nice things about time is that eventually most CSS features become supported by the major browsers. When I first wrote about opacity several years ago, it wasn't widely supported. Having the browser fade an image or make it transparent was a pipe dream and the best you could hope for was a photoshopped image layered on top of text with z-index positioning. But now it's more widely supported and there are some great effects you can do with it. But first you need to learn how to do opacity with CSS. And that tutorial from Coding Cow is helpful and pretty.

I use my iPod to browse Web pages almost daily these days, and I can tell you that while mobile Safari works well, there are some sites that are still nearly impossible to read. I hate having to zoom in so much to read the text that you then have to scroll side-to-side in order to read the whole line. And I've got 20/20 vision. I imagine that people with poorer eyesight just hit the back button when they get to those pages. This article on Templated Business How to create a mobile phone friendly website design shows you some specifics to make a more friendly mobile version of your site. I have a few suggestions of my own in my article Tips to Design Web Pages that Work on Small Screen Mobile Devices. But one thing I would always recommend - don't force people to use the mobile version, especially if it's a stripped down version of your site. If I can't get to what I want on your site from my phone or PDA, it's very unlikely I'll check it out when I'm back on my computer.

I just finished reviewing 9 different HTML validators, and my conclusion is that none of them are great. There are a lot of features that I wish that most validators have that most don't have. So it was hard to pick the best. The W3C validation service has the advantage of being a validator provided by the people who set the standard. Plus, it's free. It doesn't include features like checking links, spelling, or CSS, but you can use other tools on their site to do that as well. What I like best about this tool is that it checks your document against the DTD that you put in your document.

• Find out more about W3C Validation Service
• Learn my rankings for the other HTML validators
• What's your favorite HTML validator?
• See previous software picks of the week

Finding Web design jobs can be tricky. There are lots of places you can look and some provide better job prospects than others. One place that some people have suggested to me is Craigslist - the online classifieds website. Have you ever found a Web design job on Craigslist? Would you use it again to find work? I once hired two people when I posted a Craigslist ad, but I've never gotten a job from Craigslist. What has been your experience with finding work on Craigslist?