I started in middle school with TI-BASIC apps on my TI-85 calculator to help me in math and physics classes. Then I moved on to VB .NET a few years later when I got to university. Pretty much I did it all with scratch-my-own-itch problems as they cropped up.
It progressed as such for me (mainly due to course progression at school):
TI-BASIC >> VB .Net >> C >> PHP >> C# >> Python >> Ruby
So far elance.com has gotten me decent wages that an American would expect; however, freelancer.com and vworker.com have yielded nothing but $5/hr crap jobs and projects where the scope creep was so bad I ended up making like $2/hr by the end. Also, freelanceswitch seems to be better because you have to pay $7/mo to bid on jobs and most of the $5/hr crowd won't do that.
A lot of people heavily borrow from existing site's designs; however, it'll probably hurt your portfolio. If people realize that your designs aren't actually original they may not want to hire you or they may insist on reduced pricing.
I've used elance, freelancer, and v-worker, and a few others without much success.
The Aussie companies have retarded policies for allowing you to get your funds out of their account (freelancer makes you wait 15 business days for instance for the first transaction). They also take their cut before you even start the work, often placing your account into the negative and then if the client bails they keep your money.
It's hard to get bids accepted when most people are choosing providers based solely on lowest price rather than aptitude. Also, like 90% of the people that I've worked with on these sites are high-maintenance and change the project's scope every five minutes. One guy even is trying to sue me even though I implemented what it is he wanted (pre-scope-creep).
And as for Craigslist being better; I don't think so! Every job that I've gotten through Craigslist except for one has been low pay, the client dragged their feet with everything and yet was super demanding and unrealistic in their expectations.
There's gotta be a better way to do freelance business but these sites don't appear to be it. Many of them are just places with sub-par services for freelancers that are designed to upsell you add-ons like testing and badges.
The switch from FF to Camino was because I wanted something based on FF but that behaved like a native OS X application. The switch from Camino to Chrome was mainly due to curiosity/hype/etc and it turned out to be true what people said about Chrome being pretty great. Another main consideration was the fact that I want to get into WebGL and Chrome supports it well.
I ditched Firefox for Camino three years ago and then upgraded to Chrome when I got a new MBP two months ago. I'll never switch back from Chrome.
Firefox on the Mac is brutally slow at times for me and the interface doesn't look nearly as nice as Chrome. I like software that gets outta my way and lets me work effectively. The developer tools in Chrome are way better than Firebug IMO anyway so no hangup for me there.
I can usually implement 1-2 features in code per day (more when programming in Ruby). In most cases I can only get like 25% of a site mocked up in a day (I'm really slow when it comes to design).
It progressed as such for me (mainly due to course progression at school): TI-BASIC >> VB .Net >> C >> PHP >> C# >> Python >> Ruby