Amazon announced in January their new Simple Email Service. This was timely as the project I'm working on at the moment needs to send out quite a lot of transactional emails. A few days later MailChimp announced they'd created a layer on top of the Amazon service that gave some extra and very useful reporting features.

We were sending emails from our webserver's mail server. This was fine most of the time, but even in testing we were finding that a few emails were getting turned down as spam by people’s email clients. Using an email sending service was something we were considering to help us …

I'm working on a new Orchard module at the moment for the Orchard Module Contest. It's been my evening project for the last week and I've had a really good day working on it today. I've figured out most of the difficult stuff so it's looking like I will (fingers crossed) finish in time for the deadline on 15 March. There are still a lot of things to add and tidy up though.

The module lets you create content items for places and then add them to a Bing map. Even if it doesn't win, it's something that should help with several project ideas I have. It would be nice to win though.

When it's …

You can use standard ASP.NET caching in Orchard, but it makes more sense to use Orchard's CacheManager service. It works better with tenants and I think it’s a bit nicer to use than the usual .NET way.

I needed to add caching to the driver of my weather module. It gets the weather data from the BBC. This information doesn’t change that often and it takes a while to get. So it made a lot of sense to cache it.

There are several ways to invalidate a cache, but in this case I just want my cached result to last for a certain amount of time.

To do this you’ll need an instance of ICacheManager and …

I’ve just finished redesigning my site and implementing that design as an Orchard Theme. While it’s still fresh in my head I wanted to write down what I’d learnt. The documentation on the Orchard site is pretty good, but I wanted to write down the things that I found most important. I hope you find it useful.

An Orchard page is made of lots of bits; layout, zones, shapes, items, parts and fields. This can be a bit confusing and I’m still getting my head round it. You can find a more complete description of all of these in the anatomy of a theme in the Orchard documentation.

The HTML that …

Today I’m very excited to announce my redesigned website. Ever since becoming a freelance web developer my website has been a work in progress; something that I would finish off when I was less busy. I’m sure my old site must have put some clients off and it definitely didn’t reflect me in the way I wanted.

Well, I’m still busy, but I decided that 2011 would be the year I made my website something I was really proud of. It’s been my evening and weekend project for a little while now, and all the effort has finally paid off.

On previous redesign attempts I’ve got stuck at the idea stage. I …

There are quite a few tools and products I’ve been eagerly awaiting from Microsoft. I’ve been working with beta versions and anxiously watching mailing lists for news of new features and possible release dates. I knew some of them would probably come out in January, but they went and released them all, and more this Thursday. It’s very exciting, but this simultaneous release is going to make it harder to learn about all of them.

Orchard 1.0

I’m most excited about this. I’ve been working with Orchard and writing some modules for it since their first alpha release in March 2010. Orchard is an …

I discovered Google AdSense in 2005 and thought I’d try it out. I didn’t think it would I make a fortune (straight away), but I thought it might pay for at least some of my hosting fees.

Google will only send you your money once you earn over £60. I didn’t think this would be a problem. It took 6 years. I just got my first cheque from Google. It’s for sixty pounds and sixty six pence. I’ve decided that it’s not really worth it for a site with my level of traffic and I've now removed all the Google Ads from my site.

I’m not sure who really does well out of Google AdSense, apart from Google. I …

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. …