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Another Egg in Your Basket

Like Dave, I've been using Smarty over the past week or so. It's a "templating engine" which, in Dave's words, means that:

...the HTML implementation of the site is independant of the core code. This allows a seperate designer to work without messing up the code implementation (although its all just me for now).

Likewise I too am doing it all on my own at the moment. I can see the benefits of using Smarty and in ways it will make my life easier, but I am the designer and the developer. This tends to be the case on all projects I work on and can't remember ever having been given the design of a site for me to simply add the code to. This approach to site creation is probably familiar to us all - the need to be a Jack of all trades. I've worked on a few teams where we've had a dedicated graphic designer, but more often than not it's down to us, which is of course either a good or a bad thing.

If you've ever wanted to add life to a site you've probably looked for some images to use. To do this you can use "stock photography" - commissioned photos of all and everything. You see lots of them used on brochure-style sites in cheesey shots of business-men shaking hands and pretty girls answering phones in call-centres. They can also be used to add a professional look. Codestore does well without any images but you could just as well use some abstract art, such as on Notestips.

Anyway, I am reminded of this following a phone call from my girlfriend, Karen, yesterday. She has a short-notice interview at a school in Nottingham today. Part of the interview is to teach a class from Year 7 about the School Council. For this she wanted me to find some photos of good food, bad food, exercise, smoking and drinking "off the internet". They needed to printed off and cut out ready for the kids to make posters promoting healthy-living.

Not wanting to waste time Googling for them all I turned straight to the stock photo sites. I used to use Photodisc but they are way too expensive if you want to use them in anything more official than a classroom project. Now I turn to iStockPhoto where all the photos are royalty-free and only cost $0.50 to download them. It's a community site and you are rewarded if you contribute images with free downloads.

It didn't take me long to find the 25 assorted photos Karen needed and it shouldn't take you long to find something to add that professional look to your site. Try searching for "abstract for starters...

Comments

  1. Hi Jake,

    I use {Link} - they are free if its for non commercial use (on the internet) though not so good in your case as you would have to pay for printable versions.

    Mark

  2. I just stumbled into OpenMax {Link} Seems to be free but dunno if it is useful.

    P.S. Just started my new homepage on a free hoster with PHP and MySQL for free (just a little ad when you use MySQL) and unlimited traffic and diskspace. Just sign in and your page is online!!! www.funpic.de

  3. Smarty, and other templating engines like it, are what I miss when doing Domino development. Nothing more frustrating than searching through various events and design elements to find that one snippet of HTML that is causing you grief.

    • avatar
    • Andrew Tetlaw
    • Wed 17 Mar 2004 17:24

    Stock Exchange (www.sxc.hu) {Link} has loads of free high quality pics too.

    • avatar
    • Andrew Tetlaw
    • Wed 17 Mar 2004 17:43

    The velocity Project {Link} over at jakarta.apache.org is a similar thing to Smarty. It's java based so you can use it in Domino driven websites too.

    One nifty thing about it is you have the ability to expose any java classes you like to your templates. Which means it's trivial to expose the Notes java classes.

    So in a template you can do something like:

    #set($v = $db.getView("$keyword.file_list"))

    #set($vec = $v.getAllEntriesByKey("file.${document_key}", true))

    to get a ViewEntryCollection to iterate through

    It's also as simple as attaching the jar file to a java agent.

    And it's open source! I even wrote a custom iterator for Notes Collections. And of course you can write your own java classes to expose in templates to make jobs like getting a ViewEntryCollection much easier.

    You need ND6 though, it runs fine under Java 1.3 but not 1.18 in R5

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Written by Jake Howlett on Wed 17 Mar 2004

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.

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