Best Practices

I think we can all admit that the few choices CSS gives you for bullet shapes in unordered lists are pretty pedestrian. I’ve done designs where neither disc, circle, nor square was appropriate for the look-and-feel of the site. I know I’m supposed to be able to substitute an image with the list-style-image property. To be honest, I’ve never had much luck getting that particular property to work correctly. Maybe I just never spent much time on it because it’s so easy to just manipulate the background of my list items and get exactly what I’m seeking.

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It’s been a little over four months since I left my 9 to 5 job to do freelance web development full-time. Since I became self-employed, I’m not accountable to anyone else for my work habits. Of course I’m accountable to my paying customers for the work I produce, but what about marketing, accounting, and all the administrative work involved in keeping my business afloat? There’s no one who knows (or cares) how I get these things done.

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I can’t say that either side has done anything to absolutely convince me, but Emil makes a compelling case with his article, Why XHTML is a bad idea.

I’ve had several occasions to work on web sites for photographers. One of the most important features on a photographer’s site is the galleries of photos. Potential customers want to see the quality of work. Unfortunately updating the site with the latest and greatest shots from their portfolio can be a time consuming process for photographers. There’s a certain amount of prep work required, part of which is creating a thumbnail version of each photo. Since computers are great for automating repetitive tasks, I cobbled together a few pieces of code I found on the web into a PHP snippet that will create a thumbnail from an existing image.

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