Klaas

Becoming a self-employed web designer, web publisher and/or web developer. I'm not sure about what precisely though but the "self-employed" part is very important to me. I don't see myself doing a 9 to 5 job or following the same old schedual years after years, and I wouldn't like to work under someone. I already managed to get several clients (a university, a union, a large cultural organization and several small firms) to keep me occupied during the holidays which is a very nice school for what I'm planning to do in the future. I do think that once I finish college I'll probably work in a firm for a while so I can network and gain some real life business experience. Belgium also isn't the best country to start a web development business because people are pretty conservative around here regarding internet. So my best bet would be doing something in the consultancy or publisher area, not design or development.

Some days not at all, some days 14 at maximum. I guess average is about 6-8 hours.

You'll find a bunch of such words here: http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/

Beech and oak.

Nah, Romanum is a genetive, so it means "of Rome".

It's indeed Senatus Populusque Romanum. The Q is for the que after populus. Que means "and" and is put after a noun in Latin, attached to it. So the meaning is the senate and people of Rome.

@Caesar Well that's a typical misunderstanding surrounding Esperanto. In fact it is a language you can use, there are quite a bit of online Esperanto communities and many countries have their own Esperanto teams. Also many books have been translated to Esperanto and in some countries there are even radio shows. The coolest thing perhaps is that several members of the Esperanto organization offer free bed and breakfast to foreign members visiting their country. Anyway just depends why you're learning an artificial or dead language. Esperanto is useful because of the nice community surrounding it and the creativity of the language while Latin is a lot more interesting from a philosophical, historical or religious POV. @Nathan Yeah same thing here. Did some online courses but due to a lack of time it's on hold :/

I did Latin for about 7 years and have nearly forgotten everything besides the basics. The thing is that since the fourth year we were only focussing on literature, social life, history and philosophy, the teacher did most of the translations. If you wish to learn it you either need a lot of time or follow it at school. The basic grammar really isn't that hard, it's just a matter of knowing the rules and extending your vocabulary. But understanding texts can be a pain, especially because the good old Romans were fond of style figures and the problem that the meaning of certain sentences depends on word order and combination. The interesting thing about Latin for me was just the texts we had to read. It's cool to jump into the mind of someone around that time, to read about their problems, passions, life, philosophy, etc. If you want to learn an interesting language have a look at Esperanto. I know it's not that popular but it's a very creative one and actually quite fun to learn. No need to study tons of grammatical rules (like Latin) or tons of vocabulary. If you know the few basic rules and the roots of several words you're all set.

In Flanders a real delicacy is horse meat. Don't know if this sounds strange to Americans, but our English neighbours think it's horrible. Oh and we eat frogs, snails and sea snails too

The long term plan here is to graduate from college in two years, establish my small web publishing/consulting/design business and work for a few years for a company until I feel assured enough to become fully self-employed. And of course get kids Short term plan ... quickly finish projects for school and clients so I can finish my own websites.

First one: Problem here is that you're trying to put too much in one picture. Either you have a much larger banner or you get rid of things that aren't so important. There also isn't a good balance aside from the left title and the right logo. It feels as if there's no real background but simply some pictures put atop eachother. So either you should make the foreground images stand out a lot more and make the background more monotone. The background is also composed of three areas which makes it seems as if there are three different backgrounds instead of one. You should make it blend much more into eachother. I'm also not a fan of the font you're using, looks a bit plain imho. For the second one the same comments apply though your background blends a lot more. You do have a color problem there though, the purple, blue and white should be enough, so maybe you should replace the yellow by white or something. Such a background is also not so suitable for such a small images. The three right images are a bit too much, maybe use one or two but three makes it all too full. If you get rid of the last two I'm sure it'll look much better. Good job though, just remember the saying "less is more" and a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." It's also a good idea trying to look from a different perspective at your images, eg. look at them as a composition of colors and shapes and make sure that composition makes sense and that it's balanced enough.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that Tim.

I'm with Cheezy and Tim

Some very nice sites there, Morgan. I do notice that many of those sites aren't the best examples of good usability and accessibility (some make extensive but unneeded use of Flash for example), while graphically they are quite appealing. On topic: What I'm missing on the web is a website centralising CSS tricks & hacks, usable and accessible AJAX, semantic XHTML, PHP OO design/patterns, usability best practices or good design tutorials exclusively related to modern web sites. There are quite a few for Javascript, procedural PHP, photoshopping, etc., but haven't seen one website yet doing one of the above topics. Sure, you have Sitepoint, A List Apart, CSS Drive, Unmatched Style, etc. But the problem with those is that they either offer a few tricks/articles instead of most of them or they only write large (though extremely interesting) articles which are not usable as a reference. So to summarize: I would like to see a website on modern web technologies that is practical to use. A bit comparable to W3Schools, but covering other topics and giving more detailed information. Another thing I would like to see is a centralised personal posting system. We're all active in various communities, forums and blogs, we comment Amazon products, interesting articles or reviews. That's all great, but sometimes it's a pain to remember what we've written in the past and where. What if we would be able to have our own website containing everything we've written automatically and providing an interface to post replies or comment anything, without the need to go to an external website. Example: Someone posts a new topic here. Instead of going here I see the topic appearing on my personal website and reply to it there, instead of going here first and replying here. I think this can be established using trackback/ping (for writing), RSS (for reading), XMLRPC / AJAX (for additional remote things) and OpenID (for global authorisation). Problem is that this thing relies on 3rd party software that has to implement trackback collection and output for every forum topic or blog post (eg. showing the comments that have been posted remotely), OpenID log in (to authorise remote users) and RSS for practically everything (for not only syndicating posts but also replies and comments). I believe Wordpress has already implemented most of these features, but I haven't seen one forum yet offering OpenID logins, RSS for replies and trackback for posts. Maybe something for the near future

http://www.cssvault.com/ http://www.cssbeauty.com/ http://www.cssdrive.com/ http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/