FreelanceSwitch, the popular freelance blog, has finally released their long awaited “Freelance Rock Star Book” with all kinds of great chapter for web designers, writers, graphic designers and photographers. It is a fantastic resource for anyone that is in the freelance business. It is an accumulation of what they have been writing about in their blog over the past year.

I have already ordered mine so I don’t have a full review of how it will turn out yet. But I’m sure it is a great book to get or to give away for Christmas. It is the freelance source for this Christmas season (and probably 2008). Chapters are as follows:

• Getting Started
• Your Brand
• The Working Day
• Getting Your First Jobs
• Scoping and Time Frames
• Pricing Yourself
• Doing the Job
• Clients
• Getting Paid
• Marketing Yourself
• Building a Business

A great list of chapters that all sound right on topic for what most of us freelancers are looking to focus on. You can buy the book from this site.

Popularity: 13%

Opera’s CTO announced that they are filing a formal complain against Microsoft and the Internet Explorer browser. Their complaint is about their lack of support for web standards and the disservice they have done to the web community at large. Opera calls for the support of the web community in this charge.

This is fantastic, I’m glad that Opera has stepped up and shown their support for web standards vocally. Most in the web community have known that the Opera web browser has been the largest supported and advocate of web standards. Not many outside of the web design community have been aware of this though. Most don’t even realize that web standards is an issue. I hope that something actually comes out of this, I would like to see an update that makes IE7 web compliant. It is insane for such a large company to know adhere to web standards such as Microsoft does.

Popularity: 10%

Ask.com has announced that they are launching a new feature to their search portal that will allow visitors to search the internet through their service anonymously. This means that your concerns for your search data and privacy safety when using Ask.com to search are gone. Not that it was a huge concern from Ask specifically but with AOL’s recent release of search data there seems to be a big concern about what can be found out from it.

There were a lot of the searchers from that release whose identity was found due to the data. Some of the people were a little less then happy what was found out about them. The AskEraser service will go live at Midnight on Tuesday. For more information about the service read their press release on the subject.

Popularity: 5%

Relative positioning can come in handy in CSS, you are much more powerful as a designer if you can place things in the exact location you are pressing towards. There are a lot of times when you want to put an object somewhere and you are unsure of how you are going to place it. Whether it be just outside of your box or just above another object. The position of your object in your HTML document is important in design. You can’t always just use the restrictive box for your web sites, web designs more and more are breaking out of the box form and becoming much more elegant designs. (more…)

Popularity: 8%

There are a lot of times when you want something to just be a few pixels higher than it is. Unfortunately for you the container of that element starts to soon. So you need to move it outside of the box. Your options in CSS? You can either use relative positioning or you can use negative margin. I’ll go over in another article so for now we will discuss the handy ability to use negative margin on objects. (more…)

Popularity: 7%

As we have all heard, titles are a very important part of anything. Especially when it comes to designing web sites, the title says it all. The title element is how your site is understood by your visitor and also by search robots. In the past people would stuff their titles with as many keywords as they could think of to ensure that search engines would pick up the keywords and they would rank higher. That really isn’t the point and so search robots ever since have given less importance to titles. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

It’s been a hectic week for me, I’m sure the lack of articles portrays that pretty good. I am just glad that I have rearranged things so I can find time to focus on things like this. At any rate, I have a great collection of links from around the web today. First off I read a great article from Sitepoint this week about Microformats and getting meaning out of your markup. From the article,

Microformats are all about representing semantic information encoded within a web page, allowing that information to be leveraged in ways that were possibly never conceived by the original publisher.

All in all a great article and something that I am definitely an advocate for standards and semantics in design they are impossibly important. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

I get this question quite a bit for people that need to test their web sites on IE6 mostly that already have IE7 installed. I have found a great piece of software from TredoSoft that does just this. It basically installed IE 3.0, IE 4.01, IE 5.01, IE 5.5 and IE 6 on your computer to let you test your web page on them. This is all assuming you have IE7 already installed. If for whatever reason you don’t want to replace your IE6 with IE7 they also have a stand alone IE7 that you can install to test your web pages on.

I mostly use this software for testing web pages on IE6 standalone. This is a very useful software for testing your web page. For those of you wishing to test Safari you may know that it has been released for PC, but it is still a little buggy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a good way right now to test other browsers on your Mac but I will keep an eye out for something that does. Hopefully the company will create IE6 stand alone for the Mac soon. Currently it does work for Windows XP and Vista though.

Popularity: 14%

Many of you have been asking, “What fonts are safe for me to use on the web?” and “Is there a list of web safe fonts for reference?” Well I am here to help. Web safe fonts are ever important but a lot of designers I have seen lately are forgoing this important step in their design creation. Some are taking the steps to use a font similar to a web safe font but because it is not in fact web safe they inevitably have to default back to a font that isn’t quite the same. Their design loses a little of itself and at this point they typically struggle to find a font that is close and web safe. There are plenty of web safe fonts available it just takes some creativity in using them to your advantage. I have a list of web safe fonts available in the article to help everyone out. (more…)

Popularity: 17%

The much anticipated follow up to my 4 part series on CRAP design (CRAP is Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity). I didn’t plan on taking this long to have this article up but as it happened work got in the way of things. But on to the good stuff.. Alignment is impossibly important in design because it is the basis for everything that is design. Without alignment you have elements that are seemingly unrelated and randomly placed. This easily applies to web, print and other media just as the other CRAP principles do. Alignment is used to create order in your design. (more…)

Popularity: 6%