With the help of the Oomlout lazer cutter I've been making a few things, including these Christmas Cards. Much quicker than scissors, but I did set the card on fire on my first attempt. Happy Christmas everyone.

You can see some other pictures on Flickr.

A layer in Orchard CMS allows you to control which pages a widget will appear on. When you install Orchard you get some layers already defined, but you can also add new ones based on rules like url “~/”. I wanted to create a layer based on the tags I had used for the pages content, so I needed a rule that looked at tags.

When I asked in the forum, it turned out there wasn’t a tagged rule, but it would apparently be easy to write my own. Writing a new rule was quite easy, but getting at the tag info wasn’t. However, with an awful lot of help from the Orchard Team I got one working and I’ve …

I was working on this at the start of the year, but I wasn’t allowed to tell people. Muddle Earth is Children’s BBC series based on a popular book, which in turn is inspired by The Lord of the Rings. The BBC has been working with Dubit to make an online world and game for the series. You get to wonder round the world you've read about and seen in the series and get challenged to do various quests and play several smaller mini games. This was all made using Flash and can be played in a web browser.

One of the things that make the whole online world so fab is the quality of the illustration. …

When I first learnt ASP.NET I wrote a control for my website that told my visitors the weather I was currently experiencing. It was just a simple, fun project to help me learn. Now I’m using Orchard for my site I still want my visitors to know the weather I am experiencing. So this seemed like the ideal project for my first Orchard CMS module.

I wanted the module to display a widget that could be placed anywhere using Orchard’s new Widget Manager. At this point in time the documentation for making widgets isn’t complete and I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks along the way.

The first thing to …

Three years ago today I sat down at my computer to start my freelance career. I didn’t have any clients yet, but I had some leads that seemed pretty good and I was quietly confident that things would go well. I was my own boss and I was free to do what I wanted to do. I now call this day Freedom Day.

Things were a bit slow to take off. The leads, that had seemed good, turned out not to be. I’ve become a lot better over time at judging possible leads, but you still can’t always tell if one will actually lead to a project.

I had a very enjoyable first month doing my own projects while searching …

Orchard is an Open Source CMS being developed by Microsoft that uses .NET MVC. It’s still not officially released but I’ve been running this blog using it since the alpha release in April. Every time a new version has come out I’ve planned to close my own blog and move the final posts over here. Version 0.5 felt really close to letting me do that, but there were a few show stoppers.

Version 0.8 has just come out and I’ve just finished upgrading to it. All the show stoppers are gone and there are some really nice new features. I wouldn’t recommend it to a client just yet. It still needs some …

Here is a guest post I wrote for The Guardian Leeds Blog:

Happy 21st for Pyramid of Arts at Light Night Leeds

I've bought a lovely colouring book from my friend Andy.

To show how much fun I had doing one of the colourings I made this simple stop frame animation of my work. If you'd like to have this much fun, why not buy the Hexjibber Colouring and Activity Book.

I'm excited about the possibilities that touch screens and multi-touch screens will give us. I'm also interested in HTML 5 and making something that will work accross a variety of devices whether they have a touch screen or just a mouse. To play about with both I'm currently making a colouring book app that will work on an iPad, a desktop computer's browser and hopefully any other touch enabled phone browser.

<Canvas> is a new HTML tag that is part of HTML 5. It acts like a drawing surface that you draw on using JavaScript commands.

In JavaScript you can catch mouse and touch events. At …

I read a great article recently by Phil Haack on sending JSON to an action method. This was very timely as I wanted to do exactly that in the REST API I've been creating for Kensei, a video hosting website. However, I wanted to make it work with XML as well as JSON.

Phil Haack creates something called a JSON value provider, so I followed his example and created an XML value provider. I've used it on two projects now and it's worked a treat. I thought I'd share it with the world in the hope that it will be useful to others.

Source code

XML Value Provider (C# source)

To get this working in your …