Dale Williams

Bootstraping with style

2012-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Just over a week ago twitter released v2.0 of Bootstrap.

Bootstrap is, for those of you who don’t already know, a framework for all skill levels to help setup websites easier, better and faster.

After looking though the examples I wanted to try it out so I’ve restyled my website with Bootstrap.

There are a number of really nice things that you get out of the box with Bootstrap that I believe make it very easy to get a basic site up and running in no time.

The main ones that I used were:

Grid system - used to layout the page
Nav, tabs, and pills - used to generate the Tags page
Navbar - self explanatory
Alerts - used to display information about posts

Of all of the features in Bootstrap I feel that the Grid system provides the most value as it allows you to easily develop a responsive design.

What do you think is the best feature of Bootstrap?

Switched blog to jekyll

2012-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

This weekend I’ve spent some time migrating my blog from Blogger to a github hosted jekyll site.

The reason for this was that there were a number of things that blogger was lacking such as syntax highlighting and the flexibility to play around with the back end.

Even though not being able to modify back end code was one of the positives for using Blogger in the first place, I wanted to switch the blog from a subdomain to a top level domain and didn’t want to be restricted in the content that I could generate.

Code52 - What a great idea

2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Earlier this week I saw an intriguing post on twitter inviting people to join the code52 room on JabbR.

My first thought, what’s code52?

From the about page of the code52 website “We want to build fun stuff in our spare time, give back to projects which need support, and create a community</b> which is inclusive and engaging.”.

This sort of collaboration is unheard of in the .Net community and I’m looking forward to getting behind some of the projects.

Having well designed apps available to learn from should help prevent people from learning from apps like the Northwind Starter Kit that weren’t designed for this purpose.

The majority of open source code I’ve seen in the .Net space are tools that help solve problems instead of concrete examples of how to solve a problem in a particular domain.

Initiatives such as this will help foster stronger collaboration between developers who are passionate about sharing what they can do with others and provide an avenue for learning that wasn’t so easily accessible.