Here’s a link to an article over at Freelance Switch. There are many Blogs about really useful aspects of freelancing life, with tips and great articles.

They have listed 10 of the best. Enjoy..

Today is Blue Beanie day! If you haven’t got involved do it now!
It’s the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.
It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Put on a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 26, switch your profile picture in Facebook or other social Network and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr (here).

Event details on Facebook

Photos on Flickr

Below is a screenshot of Twitter this morning, showing colleagues supporting Blue Beanie day, including King Zeldman himself.

Here’s a good widget to see how really good your Broadband server is, does it live up to the promises of the advertised speeds of 8MB or 12MB for example?

Give your broadband a test using Speedtest.net’s Widget and find out what your broadband upload and download rates actually are.

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Having del.icio.us‘d this, I thought it would be good to highlight the number of tools to make your management of CSS easier.

A selection of tools to help you clean up your CSS and optimize it by reducing the number of empty lines in the code. However, bear in mind, this may make it very hard to follow when doing future updates to your CSS files.

One that I found useful is the CSS Redundancy Checker for checking larger CSS files and large web sites, it looks at any redundant code and repetitive code you may have. Especially if dealing with a large site that has code from previous layouts and styles. Again cleaning up the files, making leaner and cleaner.
Check them all out at: http://mashable.com/2007/09/25/css-toolbox/

One of my aims this year was to write more articles for external sites and magazines.

So here are the comments and insights into freelancing that I have provided FreelanceUK, from the interview questions they asked.

Two articles based on my feedback have been published.

Freelancing Blues? You’re not alone
http://www.freelanceuk.com/news/2505.shtml

Freelancers: we’d never work full-time again
http://www.freelanceuk.com/news/2510.shtml

Let me know your thoughts, I hope I can share my tips and knowledge I have learnt from new working practices and business techniques I have tried over the last few years.

Here’s a step by step list of how you can successfully carry out user tests on a budget and achieve great results.

Example of case study

• Usability test start off with user being asked to find individual item..
• The user/tester is normally paid for this, a real user would not take as much time to look for item.

The Comparison of costs betweeen traditional and remote testing:

• Traditional - testing lab required, specialist equipment, travel costs, user incentives.
• Remote tests - online meeting, recruitment, user incentives, better on budget.

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Released today is Twitter for mobile..

Announced by Ev, in a very subtle announcement.

All I can say is.. ‘oh dear, please stop making it more addictive than it is already’.. Probably one of the most visited sites in my daily routine, apart from gmail and the google reader.

It’s a tempting offer.. to add to the ever growing suite of ways to keep in touch with your friends and colleagues..

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