Doogal Bell's bloggy thing

The blog of my employer Business Optix has gone live. We’ll be posting there as we roll out new features to our web and desktop products, a...

My first foray into the world of bike computers was a Sigma 1609 device. I quite liked it, since it was simple to use with a clear display,...

I wanted to let users log in to our application using their Windows user name or their email address. In order to achieve this aim, I needed...

If like me you find it hard to grasp how the tiny the tiniest things are and how massively huge the biggest things are, then have a look at ...

The main argument for bankers earning vast amounts of money seems to be that in a global market, they’ll just bugger off somewhere else if w...

A while back I had to interview some people for a developer role at work so came up with a few questions, combining a few from the web with ...

Embedded Analytics provide a nice service that will email you whenever somebody clicks on a new link to your site. I’ve been signed up for ...

It seems a little strange to me that at a time when banks are meant to be desperately trying to increase their balance sheets, they are offe...

A while back I picked up a copy of the Evening Standard and was surprised to see Facebook and Twitter logos at the top of every page, sugges...

…with a somewhat larger waste line, somewhat smaller IQ and hopefully with less OCD tendencies.

I’ve been disenchanted with Google Friend Connect for a while. I only used it for commenting on my website but it has a number of weaknesse...

I’ve seen one or two examples of using Google Maps in a WinForms desktop app, but the ones I’ve seen seem to involve loading image tiles fro...

I received a bug report about my website. The maps that appear on my UK postcodes pages weren’t working in IE8. I hadn’t noticed since they...

For a long time I’ve shown the most popular pages on the home page of my website . I did this by logging every page that was viewed to the M...

If you’ve ever looked round for a profiler for XSL transformations then chances are you’ve found the Microsoft add-on for Visual Studio , wh...

Apparently I’ve been using Spotfiy for over two years . Funny, it seems longer than that. It was the perfect music service for me, unlimited...

Some time ago I imported the Ordnance Survey Code-Point postcode dataset into MySql . It looks like there’s a new version of that dataset av...

Update – I now realise this post is kind of pointless, there is a module for compression of dynamic content, called unsurprisingly Dynamic...

It took me a while to figure this out. Routing is meant to be baked into ASP.NET 4 but when i tried to set it up, all I got was 404 errors. ...

The OS Code-Point Open dataset is great, except for a few omissions. It doesn’t include data for Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man or the C...