Often I find myself needing a convenient way to pick colours for CSS files and various other things, pretty much every single day. Unfortunately, it has always been a bit of a hassle, with no convenient tool for doing so – certainly opening up something like Photoshop just for choosing a colour is not ideal! I know there are hundreds of these out there already, but somehow none of them really worked for me. I decided to write (another) one, with the really imaginative name of Colour Chooser.

Last night I attended Rob Hawkes' first hack night, focusing on HTML 5 canvas. Ever since Rob first mentioned this idea, it was something which appealed to me and it did not disappoint. It was an enjoyable evening of learning and hacking, fuelled by a supply of pizza generously provided by Microsoft thanks to Ben Nunney and Martin Beeby.

Yesterday I decided to join Rob Conery in disconnecting my hand from my mouse for 'International Mouse Freedom Day'. What's more, this was a full real-life day at work rather than just a little experiment at home. The idea was that ditching the mouse and embracing the keyboard would speed everything up, make me more efficient and probably save the world.

Recently I've been working on a couple of sites on-and-off in my spare time which both have a couple of things in common: they both use MongoDB as a data store and both incorporate the concept of tagging. Using MongoDB's map-reduce functionality is ideal for getting the list of tags, but it does come with its own set of potential issues which are well worth bearing in mind.

Last weekend I attended the latest in the series of DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper events at Microsoft's Reading campus. This one was entitled Modern .NET Day and focused on what we have available to us right now as .NET developers, rather than things we might have in the future.

Whilst browsing the web, I came across an article on URL Canonicalisation by Matt Cutts which talks about the fact you should standardise on one "main" domain name for your site and ensure any others redirects to it using a 301 permanent redirect.