Mark Embling

I've noticed with interest the 'NoSQL' movement which seems to have arrived recently and have on the whole ignored it. I generally find myself getting on well with relational databases and based on that fact (and the fact they are so commonly used), I have not looked into any of the alternatives. However, I have recently read various articles talking in particularly about CouchDB and MongoDB and after reading a little bit about both, I decided to give MongoDB a closer look.

Too often in my web development past I have found myself wading through huge clumsy CSS files of several hundred lines or more, searching for that place where a particular class is defined or to try and identify what it is that is overriding something else. It can be quite a nightmare. However I recently came accross .Less (pronounced "dot-less"), a port of the great Ruby Less library for .NET. This is a brilliantly simple-to-use solution to an often-painful situation.

Not long ago Jeremy Skinner created Phantom, a build system for .NET based on the Boo language. Since its creation, I have been following it with interest (and have forked it).

Up until recently despite my interest, I had not had the opportunity or reason to make any modifications to it. However, I have not long started developing a new site and I thought this was the perfect time to make use of it - it is clear that the clean Python-like Boo syntax is far more preferable than XML-based build files. However, it was missing a couple of features I wanted, so I have added them. I thought I'd briefly document them in this post for whoever might find it of interest.

Recently I've been researching various XML-based standards and formats for storing a CV. It seems that various different people and organisations have taken a bash at solving the problem, but there is no clear winner or format of choice. It seems to me there is a lot of confusion and quite a few half-baked solutions aimed at the problem - it is clearly something people other than myself have looked at, but that's about all I can say.

A question I've wondered about for a while now and not yet come to a conclusion on is where to put the administration for a web-based application. Take a store for example, or a blog. Should the functions for managing items or posts and so on be separated out into a designated 'admin' area or distributed throughout the site, visible to those with appropriate permissions.

Those of you using git will more than likely be pushing and pulling over a SSH connection (to github for example). Recently I posted about my preference for using git from within Powershell. However there was always one really annoying thing when compared to using git from my OS X and linux machines - the need to type my private key passphrase every single time I do a push or pull. It got to the point where I decided to do something about it. Enter ssh-agent.