Blog

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.

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.

This post shows you how to create an XML sitemap in your Umbraco website. I will share the code I have used to create my XML sitemap page http://www.codeshare.co.uk/xmlsitemap You will need an XML sitemap when you submit your site to search engines.