Blog

In this tutorial I show you how to create your own custom twitter feed for your website, which you will have full control over the styling, like the one I have on my about page. It also pulls through the follower count. This tutorial is meant for an MVC website with .NET 4.5 which makes it suitable for Umbraco too.

Throughout your career and life in general there will be times where you feel uncomfortable when doing a job or a task. Your natural reaction may be to stop doing that task (if you can get away with it) or you may want to avoid doing it all together. My advice to you is to do it more often.

Here are my top 10 golden rules for becoming a better programmer

This post shows you how easy it is to use the default Umbraco search functionality in your site. It uses a basic form and then uses razor to display your search results.

This post teaches you how to set rewrite rules for your umbraco site. You may want to force your site to go to a secure url or force it to go to a url with www. at the start. To add these rules, you need to go to the file /config/UrlRewriting.config

This post gives you the code for creating members programmatically in Umbraco. When you use this code, you can pass in the member's username, name, email address and optionally you can pass in their password and optionally assign them to a role/group.

I've been hearing a lot of good things about the The Pomodoro Technique for improving productivity. Basically, you work really hard and focus for 25 minutes without interruption and then you have a 5 minute break from it. You then go again for 25 minutes and have a 5 minute break from it, and so on and so on.

Workflowy allows you to write lists to help you focus on what's required to complete a certain job, it's free, really easy to use, and it is available on web, iOS and Android.

If you enjoy writing code and solving puzzles, you will love Project Euler.

LINQPad is ideal if you find some code on the internet that you want to quickly test, or if you want to play with the new features in C# without having to set up a windows console/forms app or website.

If you want your site to maintain the current scroll position when the page reloads or when you go to another page, this post should help you. It is ideal for paging, or for sites where you don't want to submit a form using Ajax, but you still want it to stay in position.

This gives you real placeholder images to use in your site concepts or examples. It randomly picks an image each time the page loads.