Friday, May 25, 2007

Lotus Notes - yeah, it can do that too (new company website)

We've finally published/released the new company website at my place of work (Compendia AS).

The site is designed by these guys (photoshop sketches). They also helped with some of the wording in the content on the site.

The code is 99% mine both on the server-side, and on the client-side. Apart from code and design-sketches, there was a group-effort to create a site that all of us at Compendia would be proud of.

As you can see in the address-bar, when you've been redirected, it's a notes-database.


(although most of the layout is pass-through-html)


I used mootools for FX.

I first created a skeleton (actually two, one for the front page, and one for the main content) with Aptana (HTML, JS, CSS). Then I moved the HTML into a forms/subforms.

One of the biggest headaches, was having the shadow-effect look the same in FF/Opera/IE.

Under the items in "Løsninger" in the menu, there are product-screenshots. Click on them, and they "zoom" to full size.

Accessibility isn't the best, and the JavasScript/CSS is messy/unstructured. What was most important to me, was what the target audience (our customers) would see rendered in their browsers.

PS!
There is an easter egg. If you click on one of the items in the menu on the front-page, you come to the main content. In the left menu, there is slideshow of all employees at our company. If you click on one of us, there is a nice little surprise (different for each employee).

The "old" website

Please leave your comment, good or bad, on your impression of the site.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Some may call it propaganda, but it has some (seemingly) valid points. As far as governments pushing CO2=global warming to hold down the developing countries, I'm a bit sceptic. Not very fond of conspiracy theories.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Run agents onserver with a toolbar button



This is mostly borrowed code/design elements from a colleague of mine, Kjetil Grødem (sorry Kjetil).

The functionality I've added is using environment variables to remember which agent was last run, to save time when developing new agents to run on server. I've also made the formula needed to have the "runonserver" accessible from the toolbar in Lotus Notes, both of which were no major tasks.. :)

Demo-db with the subform and agent needed:
>> Download

Formula for toolbar-button:
====
@Command( [FileOpenDatabase]; "server": "dbpath");
@Command([ToolsRunMacro];"aos");
@PostedCommand([CloseWindow])
====
server=server
dbpath=path to database that the aos-agent/subform lies

Screenshot: