This post is part of a series where I'm hoping to prove to myself that building a dynamic website without a CMS is comparable to building one with a known CMS. See the first post for an explanation of why

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In his awesome book, "Don't Make Me Think" (shameless affiliate link), Steve Krug drives home the message that time spent figuring out how your site is supposed to work is not time spent deciding to engage with your site. So, we're not going to do any ground-breaking design work for this company web page.

This post is part of a series where I'm hoping to prove to myself that building a dynamic website without a CMS is comparable to building one with a known CMS. See the first post for an explanation of why

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Setup

So, it's relatively easy to get an Hello World page displaying…

I was once complaining about having difficulty setting up a very slightly unusual feature in a Drupal site that was taking forever to achieve. The framework made so many assumptions about what I should do that it wouldn't let me do what I wanted to.

A freelancer commented that if he was quoting on a project that had a requirement that it use a given CMS he didn't quote any less than building from scratch. He had found it didn't make enough difference to the effort he'd spend…

This stuck with me and matches my experience so far. (yeah, yeah, confirmation bias. I know)

TokuMX is an

"open source, high-performance distribution of MongoDB".

On a current project we're using MongoDB and, as the system is likely to scale fairly heavily, worrying (primarily) about storage. So, I picked up a task to compare MongoDB and TokuMX.

I dealt with an unusual requirement over the last few days. And wish I'd understood some of the more unusual ways that big numbers are handled in C#, Entity Framework, MS SQL and Oracle

So I'm building a page in a mobile app to find "things".

Some assumptions:

• If you're using the app you are already familiar with the "things"
• You've clicked "Find Things" and so you're expecting, as a minimum, to type something into a box (to tell the app what things you want to find)
• You're a busy person and you don't want to have to think

For years now I've not bothered buying a satnav because maps on my iPhone has been good enough… sometimes a bit dodgy (once taking a route more fitted for a mountain bike) but generally serviceable.

Taking a trip from Manchester to Kettering this weekend with only my iPhone on iOS6 and the missus' on iOS5 was eye opening. Also, bleedin' awful… - 'drive around a roundabout twice in confusion' awful.

I really did give it a good go but this image sums up the difficulty faced using iOS6 maps.

So it occurred to me that my kids might enjoy The Lion King (they like roaring). Our TV is really a computer and is hooked up to the internets allowing all kinds of iPlayer and similar streaming goodness.

I guess I'm not unusual in that when I want to find something I google it…

Disclaimer: I use and love an iPad (1). I've got an iPhone, mac mini, a MBP and an iMac. But I'm not an out and out fanboy - I'm a windows admin and nascent C# developer. I try to use Linux where it fits and find more places it fits all the time. And I've been developing an Android application.

TL;DR The transformer prime is a beautiful computer but it might be true there's an iPad market and not a tablet market.

UPDATE

And then today Google release Chrome for Ice Cream Sandwich. BEST. TABLET. BROWSER. EVAR.

Oh wait… this is awful. AWRUCHKA. Right dry heaving done with.

It's a good job so few websites want to authenticate users and collect data on them otherwise we'd constantly have to write the same code ove… what's that? Oh my! Everyone is going through this.