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A little bit of History
Sloppycode.net is the personal site of me, Chris, a 2930 year old developer from London. I've been programming professionally for around 9 years now, starting with mostly LAMP technologies alongside ASP/SQL Server or Access and moving over to Microsoft (and .NET/C#) only in around 2002. I'm currently studying part time for my second degree, this time a science one: Computer Science and finishing off my MCAD qualification in C#. I enjoy programming rather than just doing it to pay the mortgage, so tend to spend chunks of my freetime doing my own pet C# projects.

The website started off in around 2002 as a place where I would chuck lots of example code I had done (Pony apps as a friend Sean might say) - applications in early prototype form. It also contained my learning notes for ASP, FSO and the Dictionary Object. I didn't want to bring my books to and from work so I annotated them and put them on the website.

The website started growing and began to receive lots of hits when I stuck a parsed version of the MSDN VBScript reference I had on here. Basically people couldn't find the official MSDN docs and came here from the google links.

The site was originally done in PHP, then moved to ASP.NET each time having its own basic custom content management system. Now it's run using Umbraco.

Site technologies

Umbraco
This is an open source ASP.NET 2.0 content management system. It's probably the most flexible and intuitive one I've used, with the bonus that it's free. Everything is stored in SQL Server and allows you to customise the XML output using XSLT, User controls and Python. It also has nested templates, custom object and attributes,Tiny MCE editing, versioning and a whole host of other features that would normally be reserved for $100k+ "enterprise" CMS systems.



Syntax Highlighter
All the snippet code is done using Alex Gorbatchev's Javascript syntax highlighter. It transforms a textbox into a syntax highlighted output dynamically.

http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/

Menus
The site uses the jQuery javascript api for FSO/ASP/Dictionary Object and reference library menus.



A customised version of Andreas Blixt's tab system for the snippets menu.

http://tutorials.mezane.org/tabbed-navigation-using-css/#Introduction