I have received several emails recently about creating galleries with CSS. Most people still use tables to create your basic image gallery in CSS. There is a much simpler way to do this with a list and some very easy CSS. Depending on what you want to do with your photo gallery you may want to have a caption or more information available on the page. This simple method can be expanded for use on staff pages or real estate sites to list houses for sale.

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Popularity: 4%

A lot of people give suggestions on how to improve your website or blog. Whether it is via SEO or design suggestions. Not many tell you what is going to destroy your website. I may be a little extreme but there are several pet peeves (as do many in the web design world) have that can truly turn your site from great to lame. There may be a couple of these that are straight forward but when dealing with clients it can become very obvious that some of their ideas on how a website should function are modeled after MySpace and the ilk.
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Popularity: 6%

When it comes to voting for the future president of the United States, or even for the primary election to choose which candidate your party will choose, the decision can be difficult. There is health care, the war in Iraq and the economy amongst major issues for the 2008 presidential election. One of the major issues probably isn’t whether their web site’s design looks good or has valid code. However, most of us visiting this web site are probably at least curious. I know I am. I would totally run a poll to see who thought which web site’s design was best amongst the presidential candidates— but we all already know who has an obsessed and loyal following on the internet. Needless to say, the results would be a little skewed.
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Popularity: 14%

As I am sure most of you have heard, Microsoft has made an unsolicited offer to Yahoo in the sum of $44 billion.
The Sunnyvale, CA based business started in January of 1994 at Standford University by two graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The orginal website was called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” In April of that same year they renamed the company “Yahoo.”

There are a ton of news articles out there on the topic right now, it is going to be an interesting situation to watch. With Yahoo! and Microsoft struggling against Google in the search arena, anything is possible.

New York Times: An Offer Yahoo Can’t Refuse

TechCrunch: What would a combined Yahoo-Microsoft look like?

Washington Post: Microsoft Offers To Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion

Reuters: Microsoft says Yahoo would help it turn a web profit

Popularity: 7%

Ian Hickson has announced that the acid3 test is completed and available for testing on browsers. The test uses DOM scripting to evaluate HTTP, CSS, HTML, ECMAScript, SVG and even XML. So far none of the released browsers pass it, most aren’t even close. Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t know whats going on and Firefox 3 only gets 58/100. So it looks like the browser vendors have a little ways to go before they are ready. Ian began working on the acid3 test about the same time that Microsoft announced IE8 passed the acid2 test (with special http headers being passed).

Popularity: 8%

I don’t have much to say on this topic yet because I haven’t even gone over it much. Check it out though if you are interested in some specs and general information about the future of HTML5. The HTML5 Working Draft for January 22, 2008.

Popularity: 9%

I consider myself one of those people that monitor 100s of RSS feeds daily and actually read a large portion of the articles I see a day. So when it comes to using a feed reader, you need it to be very good at what it does. At one point I used Opera’s built-in reader but with the amount of feeds I had it wasn’t running very fast and so I ditched it. Firefox is the same way, I can’t use their live bookmarks or feed reader extensions because I already bog it down too much with extensions.

I’ve gone through all of the RSS feed readers I can find online, I can’t use the feed readers that are local software because I need to be able to access my feeds from work, home and on the go with my Treo. It is also handy for when I am using my laptop at Coffee shops and Cafes. So using an online-based service is paramount to me when it comes to making a decision for RSS and Atom feed readers. So here is my list of my favorite online feed readers.

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Popularity: 12%

There are a lot of job boards out there that can help freelance web designers find work, a lot of them aren’t very good and you can find some clients that expect to pay pennies for hours worth of potential work. The problem you will mostly find is that a lot of people that post jobs on job boards aren’t expecting to pay much. I have compiled a list of freelance job boards for web developers that will allow you, the freelance web designer, to find work that actually pays good enough to be worth your time. Contact me, however, if you are looking for a freelance web designer.

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Popularity: 42%

Twitter isn’t exactly new but there are a lot people that see it as a waste of time when it comes to marketing or even using. Used incorrectly it can be a very big waste of time, not to say that it can’t be entertaining or useful for communication and amusement. There is more then the straight-forward aspects of Twitter though. The social network can be used as a great marketing and even networking tool for you and your blog.

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Popularity: 47%

Ian Hickson has announced on his web site that he is running a contest to come up with some great JavaScript (EMCAScript 3) tests for ACID3. Ian has set aside some criteria for the test that need to be followed but once you think you meet the requirements and feel the test is effective he has requested you email it you him. Currently there are about 84 sub tests and Ian is shooting for an even 100 subtests, so there is a lot of room for some good browser tests.

1. The test must consist of the body of a JavaScript function which returns 5 when the test passes, and which throws an exception otherwise. It doesn’t matter what kind of exception.
2. The test must compile with no syntax errors in Firefox 2, IE 7, Opera 9.25, and Safari 3. (You can use eval() to test things that are related to syntax errors, though.)
3. The test must not crash any of Firefox 2, IE 7, Opera 9.25, and Safari 3.
4. The test must fail (throw an exception) in either a Firefox trunk build from January 2008 or a Webkit trunk build from January 2008 (or, ideally, both). (Opera and IE are failing plenty of tests already, I don’t want to add more tests that only fail in one of those. Of course if you find something that fails in Firefox or Webkit and Opera or IE, so much the better.)
5. The behaviour expected by the test must be justifiable using only standards that were in the Candidate Recommendation stage or better in 2004. This includes JavaScript (ECMAScript 3), many W3C specs, RFCs, etc.
6. You must be willing to put your test into the public domain. (I don’t want us to end up with any copyright problems later!)

Popularity: 52%