I've been using Mercurial for source control on my own small projects for a while and have really liked it. I've also wanted to stop supporting my own Subversion server, but previously I've found hosted solutions too expensive. That's why I like Bitbucket's pricing structure. I have lots of projects that need source control, but I either work alone or as part of a small team. Bitbucket charges by the team size, not the number of projects (which seems like a much better way to judge the budget of a project) and it's free for teams of 5 or under.

I've wanted to move my existing subversion …

November has been Movember for some of us at Old Broadcasting House.

Movember is all about growing a moustache to raise awareness and money for prostate and testicular cancer. There's only one day left and I will be shaving my moustache off as soon as possible. However Chris and Leo like theirs so much they're planning on keeping them for a bit longer into Mocember.

This year's Movember team was (in order of photo appearance):

Leo (fantastic tache) Fowler

Chris (killer whiskers) Kenworthy

Richard (gringo) Garside

Cactus photo by: Alan Levine

In HTML when you want to create a box around some content with rounded corners or some other nice feature it would be nice if you could just wrap that content in a <div> or a <section> tag and CSS would do the rest. However this rarely seems to be the case, particularly if you want the HTML to render well in older browsers. The views in my latest .NET MVC 3 project were full of repeated opening and closing sections of HTML for something that we called a chunk, which is just our word for a box with rounded corners that groups together related elements on the page. Sometimes a chunk …

Back in November 2010 MailChimp announced their 'One Million Integration Fund'. They were offering pots of money to people using their API to integrate with their product. It was early days for me and my new client working on Pianola, but we both loved MailChimp and thought it could be something that would help us out.

I was also working a lot with Orchard CMS and wanted to use it on this project. As part of building up interest in Pianola while it was being developed we created a sales site using Orchard and we wanted to be able to collect interested people’s email addresses so we could let …

Since December last year I’ve been the lead developer in a start-up making a product called Pianola. Pianola is a web based product to help bridge clubs manage their club and to bring their members a personal way to review their results and interact with the club. This week I’m in Toronto at the North American Bridge Championships demoing Pianola to club managers and members from across the pond.

This has been my first business trip abroad and Toronto is an amazing city. The first thing I’ve learnt is that when travelling for business and when carrying a lot of extra baggage with things like …

I knew I had a sort of idea what relativity was, but I also knew I didn't actually understand it. I thought it was probably one of the things that I would never get round to understanding. Then I was presented with The Manga Guide to Relativity, and I knew that if anything could explain it, then this book would be that thing.

The guide starts in manga form and tells the story of Student Body President Ruka Minagi who is challenged by Headmaster Iyagi to write a report on relativity over the summer vacation. The beautiful physics teacher Alisa Uraga steps in to teach Minagi all he needs to …

When I first went freelance and needed to meet people, I found that business cards were a staple of the networking world. I knew that I needed some, but as a new face on the networking scene I wanted mine to stand out. I came up with the idea of origami business cards. These have served me well over the last four years and definitely made me stand out, although they didn't always fit in people's wallets.

I fancied a change and also wanted a business card that would fit with the new design of my blog. One problem I've discovered with traditional business cards is that there's nothing obvious …

Inspired by Oren Eini’s series of blog post code reviews and hearing him talk on This Developers Life Life I decided to review the data access of my latest application using the Entity Framework Profiler.

This is the second application I’ve used the Entity Framework for, and I’ve found it a joy to work with. I’d heard the arguments against ORMs that said they can’t produce good SQL, but I’d also heard the argument that ORMs are made by very smart people and they can probably make better SQL than most people. What I hadn’t heard till I heard Oren’s interview was that a smart ORM will still …

Most web security attacks are based on doing unexpected things to user input to fool the website into doing something it shouldn't. As web developers we all know this, but it's hard to keep track of all the exploits that are out there and it's easy to overlook things. The attacks that target the users of a website, work by making them enter unexpected input without them realising it. This often relies on them being logged on to the target site in question so their browser is authenticated when the user clicks on a link in a phishing email.

These notes are about how to avoid making a site …

I'm very pleased to announce that I’ve just launched the 'They Landed in Vegas' website. It’s my entry for the Orchard Module Challenge.

The task for round one was to create a module for Microsoft's new Orchard CMS and if you got through round one then in round two you had to create a website to show that module off.

I love maps and I like the idea of creating tools that help people share their local knowledge using maps. So I created the Bing Map List module. The module lets you create lists of places, which you can then click on to get more information. The admin interface is really simple …