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

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.

If, like me, you like to write lists to help you focus on what’s required to complete a certain job, and sometimes break the bullet points into mini lists themselves, then this online tool should help you. Workflowy allows you to do just that, 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. It is filled with mathematical puzzles which require you to write some code to get the answer. You could use the problems as a chance to write out the solution in a different programming language.

I recently came across this fantastic resource. It is called LINQPad. You can use it to test any C#, F# or VB snippet or program. You can even use it to query databases in LINQ or SQL. It's 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# 6 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.

This post gives you the code to allow your page to load faster, by using lower quality images firstly and then replacing them with the higher quality version after the page has loaded.

A lot of websites use google maps to show their location, but they usually leave it with the default style. This post gives you the code I use to generate a map and shows you how to style it. It also shows you how to add a custom map pin icon.

You may have noticed the links on my site after each article which let you share the article on social sites like Facebook and Twitter etc. This post gives you the code I used for the icons on my site. Font gives you access to hundreds of icons, and allows you to stack them on top of eachother to create different icons. In this code example you will see I stacked the twitter icon on top of a circle and did the same for the other links.