Fresh Click Media

Update - 12 June 2008

An updated version of this post, containing full source for the control and explanation is available here.

Original Post

I just got myself a freshclickmedia.com Gravatar over at gravatar.com. A Gravatar is a little avatar associated with an email address, and quite a few blogs use them to decorate post comments. Signing up is easy - all you need to do is supply an email address, and image, and give your image a content rating.

The source of the gravatar image tag points to gravatar.com’s image generator and includes an MD5 hash of the email address to prevent email harvesting. A ‘max rating’ parameter prevents the display of unsavoury content.

There are a wide number of blogging gravatar plugins, so I decided to write an ASP.NET custom control to do the job. Here I present the control and its features.

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Respected Freelance website FreelanceSwitch founders Cyan and Collis Ta’eed have written a book about Freelancing and made it available through self-publishing site Lulu.

I picked up a paperback version and here I present my thoughts.
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No doubt most developers are in favour of coding standards, but something that has annoyed me of late is ‘coding baggage’. For example, former Visual Basic programmers using VB style in C#. Such style pollutes the purity of a language that has its own style for a particular reason.

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I’ve been mainly a C#/ASP.NET developer over the last few years, but a recent interest in Ruby on Rails (RoR) has lead me to buy a few books to help me learn the framework.

Here I present a list of books, in a particular order, that I recommend to anybody learning RoR.
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With Visual Studio 2008 now fully released, I take a quick look at some of the new language features in C# 3.0.

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One of the strengths of ASP.NET is the ability to write your own reusable custom controls, deploy them, and use them by simply dragging them onto a form from the toolbox. This tutorial walks through the implementation of a ‘TimePicker’ custom control.

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A common feature of blogs is the listing of albums or books that the author is currently enjoying. This article explains how to set up such a list in Amazon and show it on your blog using PHP and a REST web service.
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I’ve been programming in C# for about five years, and today whilst reading the C# language specification v3.0, came across the null coalescing operator.

Much like T-SQL’s ISNULL function, the operator replaces null values with the specified replacement value.

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Chances are that if you’ve been using Visual Studio .NET, you’ll have come across the concept of snippets - useful reusable chunks of code that are inserted after typing in a small textual identifier for that snippet. This tutorial describes Visual Studio .NET snippets and describes how you can create your own.

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I’m reminded again today of how quickly time has passed with this story on the BBC Website.  I find it incredible that it’s 10 years since I first visited their site, a time when I was at university, studying computer science. Read the rest of this entry »