Nilesh On Domino
I started reading Nilesh's weblog for a few weeks now. At the time I had found his link to me and during the ensuing bout of blog-tennis I'd been wondering how he found the site and why he read it. Now I have a possible answer. He's got a passing interest in Domino, having been introduced to it at work. Read his thoughts on Domino. Always good to see what people familiar with other web technologies make of the unique way that Domino functions. Includes an interesting comment from one of his readers who had always thought that .nsf meant it was from the "Netscape Foundation". Things could be worse!
Regarding the DomBlog template, I will try and get it out to you by Christmas. I've decided not to make any kind of charitable donation compulsory. If you want to donate, go ahead. If you want to treat me to something, feel free. All I ask is that you make reference somewhere on the site or its source to where you got the template.
Thanks to all for the overwhelming feedback yesterday. Not what I had intended but if it helps you let off steam then I'm glad to be there for you. What I didn't want in response to my gripe was a list of bugs and feature requests. What I wanted was a list of things that are just plain stupid, confusing oversights on the part of Lotus. Of which, I think mine was a prime example. I'll probably talk about one a week until I/you get bored with it.
Skip to the 
You can subscribe to an individual
Your buddy Nilesh says:
"One big disadvantage of Domino is that it produces ugly URLs"
Who cares, as long as you are using a domain name to hit the main site, who cares what the urls from there on out look like. I don't see this as a huge disadvantage. Yes, Domino can drive us nuts w/ certain quirks/bugs, not an item on the list from yesterdays post that i dont agree w/. However it is a great tool for building web apps that facilitate workflow, content mgt, collaboration and more. The thing about designer is its not clearly intuitive how to build slick web apps, you have to know a lot of tips and tricks to be a Jake Howlett and that of course takes time.
The "UGLY" URL is attributed to the UNID , which is the only unique identifier for a document in Notes.I don't see the UNID getting shorter.
Would be interested in hearing more about this issue and any changes that IBM should implement to provide alternate URL's to the users.
No, you don't have to use a document's UNID to pick it up in Domino... look at this very site for other ways. For example, the URL for this document is:
... BLOG-20021204?Opendocument
So long as you have some kind of unique identifier, sorted, in the relevant view, you can use that identifier as a key to pull up the right document in your URLs.
There is always the option of creating views that have keys that you specify. You can even make these keys look like a regular website. Just look at Jake's site, he created a unique key for each document so it can be referenced by the unique key.
Jake, I definitely read your site not only because of my increasing interest in Domino but also because you present things so neatly & meticulously and you have unique ideas. Even though I do not have even have the least knowledge of Domino, other than knowing that there exists something called a form and a view.
I stand by my view on the URLs. They need to be simpler. Although I came to know from Brandon Zylstra's comment on my post that R6 has URL masking features. And he helped us readers understand why the URLs are the way they are. Thanks Brandon!
I'm aware of referencing the documents using a unique identifier added by the developer, but I was referring to the unique identifier - UNID which you get out of the box.
The UNID I presume has to be kept at a certain length to manage the (high) number of documents within a database using all the combinations than can be created with that.
Here is a tid bit from the help file abour the UNID.
Read-write. The universal ID of a document, which is a 32-character combination of hexadecimal digits (0-9, A-F) that uniquely identifies a document across all replicas of a database. If two documents in replica databases share the same universal ID, the documents are replicas.
The universal ID is also known as the unique ID or UNID.
I personally could care less what my URLs look like. One way I lookup documents sometimes is very useful.
http://domain.com/database.nsf/viewname/documentkey
The documentkey can be anything. Whatever you put in the first column of the view. You don't have to use opendocument either, although I always do.
It was Jake himself (http://www.codestore.info/A55692/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20020917?OpenDocument) who linked to this article (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-tricks/) the other day. Read it, its good stuff.
Dispite of what some may expect from the title ("Seven tricks that Web users don't know"), it's not meant to educate Web users, but to educate Web developers of what Web users do not know (and are not going to learn).
Watch out for the 5. "trick". For my part, this ends all discussions about "ugly URLs". Evven though I still appreciate Jake investigating on the topic.