Reading time ~7 minutes

Note: This is a re-edit of the post Spring 3 and Tiles 2 Integration. It uses now the latest version of Apache Tiles (at the time of the writing 3.0.1) and presents how Apache Tiles is used on top of Spring/Spring MVC to construct the layout of the Podcastpedia.org website

1. Why Apache Tiles?

Well, because it

  • is a free open-sourced templating framework for modern Java applications.  Based upon the Composite pattern it is built to simplify the development of user interfaces.
  • remains, for complex web sites, the easiest and most elegant way to work alongside any MVC technology.

Tiles allows authors to define page fragments which can be assembled into a complete pages at runtime. These fragments, or tiles, can be used as simple includes in order to reduce the duplication of common page elements or embedded within other tiles to develop a series of reusable templates. These templates streamline the development of a consistent look and feel across an entire application.

Octocat Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

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Reading time ~1 minute

I’ve just upgraded the web application that powers Podcastpedia.org to use Apache Tiles 3 instead of Tiles 2. I am particularly interested in the Tiles integration with Velocity for email generation.

Note: You need at least the Spring 3.2 release for this to work.

This occured in three small steps:

  1. upgrade maven dependencies
  2. upgrade tiles elements in the Spring application context
  3. upgrade tiles dtd version
Reading time ~5 minutes

In this post I will share my experience of adding a logo in front of the site title when using the Twenty Thirteen theme for WordPress. I’ve been learning WordPress basics in the last couple of months, but I am no expert to create a custom theme, so I will stick to default ones for the moment. Up until today I have been using the Twenty Twelve theme – this is fully a responsive theme and with the right plugins you get a pretty good functionality, at least for a technical blog, …but I find it a little dull. So I said why not try some more colour? Well, the Twenty Thirteen theme is certainly an answer for that. I gave it a try on my localhost, I liked it, so I decided to give it a try in production. This is so cool about WordPress, you can change the look of your pages pretty fast, as long as you haven’t invested much too effort in customizing one theme.

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Reading time ~1 minute

1 - Select Apps

1 – Select Apps

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Reading time ~6 minutes

What is a friendly URL?

Since I started to really use the internet, about 13 years ago, I liked to bookmark useful and interesting links for later access. Of course my bookmarks list has been growing steadily ever since and it’s become difficult to just LOOK for some bookmark on a topic I remember I might have added to the list. So I do it the Google-way, I search for it by typing some relevant words. Besides tags and good titles, URLs that contain some of the words I look for, land at the top of the search results. The same is valid for search engines, who favour friendly or well constructed URLs.

Octocat Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

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