Doontime - Freelance web designer

43 Things That Run my Website Business

February 11th, 2008 by admin

Written by
Samuel
in
Freelance Resources

Having brewed websites for almost 12 years now, I’ve used a fair share
of tools and websites to help streamline the process. Nowadays, as a
busy freelancer and online entrepreneur, I try to stay as efficient as
I can in the web creation process. Just about every tool/website listed
here I use on at least 90% of my projects.

The Creative

1. Photoshop CS2 - Yeah, kinda obvious — I upgrade every other version usually. Used for all my imaging needs.

2. Flash CS3
- Another obvious one. Although I also use Flash for all my vector
needs as well (as opposed to buying Illustrator). Most people would
argue that Illustrator is a “must-have,” but you’d be surprised how
much you can accomplish with Flash (and of course, I speak as web
designer/developer, not a print or identity designer). I’m sure I’ll
get it someday

3. The FWA - The standard for the best Flash websites on the web. Great inspiration fuel.

4. CoolHomePages - Another website that simply databases great looking websites, all filed under various styles and types.

5. FaveUp - Not as many websites here as Cool Home Pages, but a really good directory of logos and some sites.

6. Flashloaded
- Some well-written and very cool Flash components. I particularly like
their 3DEnvironment component and have used it a few times.

7. Flashden - A stock Flash site. Great for inexpensive Flash stock.

8. iStockPhoto - The best micro-stock image website. A few bucks for some really great photos/illustrations.

9. TechCrunch - If anything significant happens in the world of tech, it will appear here. Great news coverage on startups as well.

10. Smashing Magazine - Great design “lists” including ones for well-designed sites and free quality sites.

11. FlashKit - A bit of a confusing website, but a great source for free sound clips for Flash and a few other Flash tidbits.

12. A List Apart - The best original articles for “people who make websites.” Great CSS workarounds here.

13. Kirupa
- Wonderful site if you’re a Flash rookie or veteran. Tons of
tutorials, tips, and files - plenty for other developers too (.Net,
PHP, Photoshop, etc.).

The Development

14. SciTE
- I’ve always been a handcoder for my sites, and this is my favorite,
albeit somewhat archaic, text editor. The shortcuts, file tabs, and
syntax coloring all seems to be just right. I use it for all my
HTML/CSS/PHP and most of my .Net

15. SharpDevelop
- Why pay hundreds for Visual Studio when you can get a very similar
program for free. The best open-source IDE for a .Net developer.

16. Firefox
- Besides being a more secure browser, Firefox has innumerable plugins
helpful for any website creator. There’s even one for opening an IE tab
so you can test your html all in one browser.

17. Google - Anything I ever need to know about anything, someone already has documented it, and Google will find it.

18. Google Groups
- As development questions often appear on newsgroups, this is where I
search for them, often finding answers Google’s standard engine doesn’t
find.

19. SourceForge
- Don’t reinvent the wheel. More than likely there is an open source
project that functions like you need it to, and you’ll find it here.

20. Three Monitors
- A 22-inch monitor is now around $300 and 19-inch ones are half that,
making it cheap to have a dual or triple monitor setup. Email on one,
Photoshop/Flash in another, and Editor/Browser in the middle.

21. IIS - Developing locally is the only way to go.

22. FreeTextBox - A great rich text box I use for creating CMS systems for clients.

23. PDShop
- Not a beautiful website nor cart, but it’s the best .Net cart for the
money. You won’t find a comparable one for four times as much.

The Backbone

24. NameCheap
- I’ve used my share of registrars and NameCheap is by far the best.
The administration is the most logical and simple, with no tricks or
annoyances.

25. CrystalTech
- The hosting company I highly recommend to all clients and use myself.
Competitive prices, great admin panel, and 24/7 tech support with very
knowledgable folks.

26. SQL Server Express/Management Studio - The free SQL Server database. Works great for smaller websites.

27. SmarterMail - Solid email software. Easy and comprehensive admin and a good webmail client too.

28. NewEgg - The low-cost, quick delivery shop for all computer hardware needs. Lots of reviews and product images as well.

29. MySQL GUI Tools - The best tools to manage a mySQL database.

The Support

30. Alertra
- Ever worry that your website might be down and you wouldn’t know
about it? For a few bucks a month, Alertra checks your site thru the
day and will email or SMS you if anything goes amiss. A lot of options
and worth every penny if you run your own websites.

31. Google Analytics - Free, robust analytics program that you can implement in 5 minutes. What more can you ask for?

32. SecureFX
- A $59 FTP program that’s reliable and well-designed. I’ve used many
of the free FTP tools out there, but this one just makes file transfer
easier.

33. Yahoo Site Explorer - An easy way to see how your site is doing from an SEO perspective.

34. Western Digital Passport
- I have a couple 80GB units for all my backups and large transfers. A
perfectly small size and a reliable company for data storage.

35. Yahoo Unlimited-To-Go
- How can you work without music? Especially when you can access an
insanely huge library of music for so cheap (one offer gives you two
years for $80).

36. Google Reader - You must keep up with the design/development field or else. I now have 40 newsfeeds that I scan almost daily.

The Business

37. BlinkSale
- As a solo freelancer, this makes invoicing so much easier. Sends
emails, reminders, and thank-yous. Also good as a very primitive
accounting of moneys received.

38. TradeKing - Profits from business go to investments via my online broker TradeKing. IRA options and only $5 a trade.

39. Fool Caps - This is a great research community for investment market ideas. A chunk of my yearly income is from investments.

40. PrimoPDF - I keep all my business as PDFs and PrimoPDF lets me transform docs easily to PDF.

41. White Tile Board
- Whiteboard at office stores is way overpriced. You can get a 4×8 foot
panel from Home Depot for $12 and coat your whole wall. Not only will
friends be impressed by your wall art and apparent tech savvy-ness,
it’s great for tracking projects or mapping ideas.

42. iPhone
- Along with a Bluetooth headset, this makes mobile communication and
information so much easier and quicker. I use it to read all my RSS
feeds as well.

43. Pidgin - An open source instant messenger that allows me to have all the various IM clients in one piece of software.

Posted in News, Photoshop, Resource, Web Design, Web tools 4 Comments »

Photoshop Design Resources
December 29th, 2007 by admin

There’s no doubt that I like to design. Next to coding, I also love
to edit photos, designing websites etc. My personal favorite tool to
achieve this, has to be Adobe Photoshop.
Next to a good tool, you’ll need some good resources. Fonts, Plug-ins
such as Brushes and Textures, Stock photos can help you tremendously
when designing. Here’s a list of my personal favorite photoshop design
resources.

Fonts, Stock Photos, Patterns, some Textures and Inspiring sites do not
require Photoshop. Also, always check the compatibility of the plug-in
with your software; Don’t download Photoshop CS3 brushes when you’re
using Photoshop 7. The other way around (Photoshop 7 plug-in using in
Photoshop CS3) can be possible.

If you think that there’s a top-source missing from the list, share
it with us by posting them in the comments. The sites listed here offer
their services for free and are placed in random order.

Fonts

The standard fonts on a PC are really boring and just created to
read. You want fonts that just look nice on your artwork. Download
fonts from the following sites to give your text a nice look.
To install, place the downloaded TTF-file (or other Font-file extensions) in the Fonts folder on your PC. This can be found in C:\WINDOWS\Fonts.

Dafont Personal Favorite
Great website, huge amount of fonts. Excellent details on each font. Ordering by name or category. Also check the top 100.

Exljbris
Free quality font foundry. Has only 7 fonts atm, but their beautiful.

1001 Free Fonts
Name of the website is self-explaining. Ordering by name or category.

Ace Free Fonts
Huge collection of fonts. Ordering on name or category.

Die Gestalten
A couple of experimental display fonts.

Fonts 500
The web’s top 500 fonts.

Urban Fonts Personal Favorite
Great
website, huge amount of fonts. Excellent details on each font. Ordering
by name or category. Also check the top 100 and favorites.

DDfont
Listing fonts that have been collected from around the web.

Font Freak
Freeware, shareware and commercial font site.

Fonts For Flash
Website that has some freebies fonts. Created for Flash, but can be used in Photoshop.

Simply The Best
Nice website with huge amount of fonts. Ordering by name or category.

Abstract Fonts Personal Favorite
Great website, huge amount of fonts. Excellent details on each font. Ordering by name or category.

Grunge Fonts
This archive specializes in Grunge fonts. Website does contain a lot of advertations.

007 Fonts
Hundreds of Freeware and Shareware fonts. Order alphabetical.

Font Files
Nice colletion of fonts. Order alphabetical.

Font Garden
Archive of fonts and dingbats. Especially look at the handwriting fonts. Order alphabetical.

Font Village
Nice collection of fonts. Website does contain a lot of advertations.

Fontreactor
Perfect site to download fonts. Nice preview font system. All fonts are sorted by alphabetical order and by themes.

Fonts101
Another website with a huge amount of fonts. Browse by category.

Acid Fonts
Good website with big collection of fonts. Browsing by name or category.

All-free-fonts
Small collection of fonts. Alphabetical ordering.

Dingbat Depot
Not an archive for fonts, but for dingbats. Ordering by name or category.

Lotsa Fonts
Nice amount of fonts. Website does contain a lot of advertations.

Sharkshock
Big collection of famous company fonts.

FontFace
FontFace
is always adding fonts to this archive. Unlike many other sites,
FontFace does not exist to be a massive archive of every font available.

Fontasy
German website with fonts. Order alphabetical at bottom of the page.

TypeNow
Big collection of famous fonts from bands, tv programs, games etc.

PsyOps
A couple of fonts

ShowFont
Big collection of fonts. Heavy pageload because of the thumbnails on the left.

Fontz
Nice website. Ordering by name or category.

Photoshop Brushes

One of my favorite tools in Photoshop has to be the brush tool.
Download brushes from the following sites to make your artwork look
better.
To install, place the downloaded ABR-file in the correct Presets folder of Photoshop. With default install-settings, this folder can be found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop\Presets\Brushes.

VBrush
Old site with Photoshop 7 brushes. Still worth mentioning.

Appendixsquared
Website with a couple of brushes. Brushes will work on Photoshop CS2 or higher.

Brusheezy Personal Favorite
Great website with a huge amount of brushes. Easy browsing and nice previews.

In Obscuro
Another site with Photoshop 7 brushes. Still has some nice brushes in the collection.

DaviantART Personal Favorite
Great website with a huge amount of brushes, created and submitted by other designers. All kinds of styles.

Photoshop Textures

If you want a little bit more depth or relief in your images, than
textures can help you out. Take note that Textures can also be images
which you must add to your photoshop file, instead of it being a
plug-in.

TextureWarehouse
Free, High Resolution Textures to Designers and 3D Artist. Textures are updated frequently.

Amazing Textures
Texture
library, with hundreds of free textures to download, high-resolution
textures, images, backgrounds, wallpapers and texture maps.

TextureKing Personal Favorite
Great website containing loads of high resolution textures. Browsing in categories.

In Texture
Here you will find a free texture to suit every need, with a wide range
of surface, mapping, bump mapping and skinning illustrations to name
but a few.

Mayang
Texture library has over 3400 free to download, free to use, high-resolution textures.

Texture Archive
Nice website with good patterns. Nice previews available.

Image*After
Next to a great stock-photo archive, this website also has a nice amount of texture images.

AppendixSquared
Small website where you can download a couple of texture packs.

Grunge Textures
Growing collection of quality images ready for you to download. All of our images are high resolution JPG’s.

DaviantART
Great website with a huge amount of textures, created and submitted by other designers. All kinds of styles.

Patterns

Patterns can be used to give a nice pattern on an image. Make sure you use them wisely; They can make your artwork beautiful.

Brusheezy
Next to their archive of brushes, this website also lists nice patterns.

DaviantART
Great website with a huge amount of patterns, created and submitted by other designers. All kinds of styles.

Not much more over here since I don’t use patterns much, but you can create patterns yourself.

Photoshop Plug-ins

Plug-ins can change the way that Photoshop works for you. Filters,
automated actions etc. can make life a little bit easier. Make sure you
install the plug-in in the right directory.

About Personal Favorite
This website contains a lot of plug-ins. You just have to check it out youselve.

Free Photoshop
Pretty old website (2003), listing plug-ins for Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Exchange Personal Favorite
Official exchange website from Adobe for Photoshop. Registration required.

Angelfire Filterz
Another old website containing a couple of Photoshop filters. No previews.

Photo-plugins
Nice website listing many photoshop plugins. Previews available.

RedField Plugins
This site contains a couple of plugins. Some are really nice to use. Previews available.

The Plugin Site
Small collection of very effective plugins can be found here.

Telegraphics
Another small collection of plugins. Type of plugin can be different.

Free Stock Photos

Stock Photo sites contain a lot of high resolution pictures by
people around the world. You can use them in your artwork, but some
pictures are copyrighted or CC‘d.

MorgueFile
A
place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an
inactive job file. This morgue file contains free high resolution
digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

Image*After
Image*After
is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any
image from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or
commercial.

Stock.xchng Personal Favorite
Whether
you just want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your
personal photos with others, this is the site for you. Registration
needed.

PhotoGen
The Photogen free stock photo gallery is constantly being updated with new photos and images.

Flickr Creative Commons Personal Favorite
One of the great Web 2.0 website with a huge amount of high resolution photos taken by users all over the globe.

Stockvault
Nice looking website containing lots of stock photos. Browsing by category, newest and popular.

FreePhotosBank
Medium size website with a couple of very nice stock photos.

DesignPacks
Small website where you can download category type photos in one archive.

Free Pixels
Another nice website with stock photos. Browsing like forum-style category types.

Every Stock Photo
Website collecting all kinds of stock photos around the net.

There are a lot of stock-photo websites out there, but I found these worth mentioning.

Photoshop Tutorial sites

The best way to learn Photoshop is following tutorials to learn from
others. Improve your skills by doing new tutorials each time.

PSLover
Big archive containing listing many tutorials from other websites.

Good-Tutorials Personal Favorite
Great website containing many links to photoshop tutorials.

Tutorial Outpost
Another big archive listing many photoshop tutorials.

Photoshop 101
Small website with links to photoshop tutorials. Updated weekly.

Lombergar Personal Favorite
This site has a couple of self-made video tutorials for Photoshop. Watch and learn.

Effectica
Nice forum with a good photoshop tutorial community.

Photoshop Lab
Website with good Photoshop tutorials. Has great explanations.

Photoshop Cafe
Small website with tutorials. Categories: FX, Text, Photo, Texture, Web and Misc.

Marcofolio Personal Favorite
Also on this site are a couple of nice tutorials listed.

Team Photoshop
Nice teamwebsite with a couple of Photoshop tutorials.

Total Tutorials
Huge website collecting all different kinds of tutorials on the web.

Fresh Tutorials
Another website containing lists of tutorials submitted by other websites.

EZPhotoshop
Great website with new tutorials, so keep a close watch on this one. Pretty darn slow website though.

Inspiring sites

To get a little design-spark, let yourself be inspired by the following sites.

Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information for web-designers and web-developers. Especially take a look at this post.

Worth1000
Don’t let the design of the website fool you. It has photoshop contests with real nice entries.

Web Designer Wall Personal Favorite
Web Designer Wall is created by the same person who made N.Design Studio.
This site serves as a public blog where design ideas are posted,
tutorials, and talk about modern web design trends. Also take your time
to read Photoshop Secret Shortcuts.

Go Media Personal Favorite
Absolute must see website. Don’t forget to check out the Go Mediazine, the blog from Go Media.

deviantART
The
largest art community of the world. Get inspired by looking at what
other people made. Huge collection and different kinds of art.

Deziner Folio
Great blog about all kinds of designing stuff.

The Best Designs
The Best Designs recognizes the best Flash and CSS web sites from around the world.

Tutorial Blog
Another blog containing design articles from around the world.

Brand Nu
Take a quick look at the work of artist Radim Malinic to get some nice new ideas.

Veerle’s Blog
Great blog with nice articles about design from a co-designer living in Belgium. Absolute worth looking.

CGTalk
Forum with different kinds of artists, both 2d and 3d. Some of those artists are real professionals.

Marcofolio Personal Favorite
Yes,
this site can give you some creativity sparks too. With posts like this
I’m sure you’ll get a whole lot of nice new ideas on what to design.

Posted by Marcofolio

Posted in Photoshop, Resource, Web tools 1 Comment »

The Most Popular Online Photography Tools
December 4th, 2007 by admin

The Web is full of interesting and amazing photos! Here’s the list of online tools and resources beginning from online photo editing to powerful photo search engines.

Photo Sharing

Flickr is certainly one the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. It helps people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. Flickr gets photos into and out of the system in as many ways as possible: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their photos. It enables new ways of organizing photos. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your photos - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. With Flickr you can create prints, calling cards, photo-books, slideshow-DVDs, postage stamps, and much more.

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos, share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web. It is fast, easy and free.

SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web.

Zooomr is a site where you can share, search, store, sort and sell your photos online.

Snappages is a collection of online tools designed to make your life easier. You can quickly organize and share your life with friends and family, and do it all online. This service is free.

Zoom and Go is about inspiring travelers about where to go, what to see, what to do and where to stay based on the experiences of other travelers or on the recommendations from locals around the world. It is a place where people submit pictures, reviews. Zoom and Go members put themselves on video as guides to the world for the places they live or the places they’ve visited.

Photorgy -is the online photo site . You can use it to post your photos, upload entire folders, link any photo from your blog or MySpace, get photos in a shared album, and more.

Clickfriends makes it easy to upload, organize and share your photos online. Create your free account and join the photo-sharing fun. It offers to create unlimited albums, upload you photos to each album, add titles, caption and description to your photos.

DPhoto lets you easily share your photos with family and friends in your own online gallery, while also creating a secure backup of all your photos. A free account allows you to store 100 photos. For $7 per month you can store an unlimited number of photos.

Free Photo Hosting

Photobucket is the most popular site on the Internet for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos, and graphics. Your free Photobucket account can store thousands of photos and hours of video. Photobucket also offers free tools for making slide shows of photos, videos with music. You can share your photos and videos with friends by email, IM and mobile phone.

ImageShack is an intuitive and easy-to-use free media hosting service. It can be used to upload images, flash files, and movies, and share them with friends using any imaginable means.

SmugMug is a photo uploader, editor, and community portal all in one. It keeps 4 backup copies of each photo in 3 states. Retrieve them anytime. It offers unlimited storage. Your friends can see your photos without registering, and without spam. No Ads.

TheImageHosting allows to upload multiple pictures at one time, link your photos in web sites, email, blogs, register an account to manage your files, create online photo galleries for free, and more.

ImageVenue is a free image hosting solution. It is designed for you to share digital pictures with friends, post images on message and bulletin boards and blogs. You can also hot link images from your personal website or eBay auctions.

Online Photo Editors

Fauxto - image editing application which allows you to free-transform beautiful, anti-aliased text within a layer, and then apply a multi-colored radial gradient with a variable focal point in another. You’ll be quite surprised with what you can do within Fauxto.

SnipShot is a browser based image editor. It enables to save pictures as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG or TIF. It has basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize, and basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue. There is unlimited undo and redo.

MyImager - is free online image editor. Upload or call images from anywhere on the web and edit them freely with the the dozens of tools and filters that myImager.com offers.

Phixr allows you to edit your pictures and directly upload them to Flickr, Fotopic, Livejournal, Photobucket, Fotolog.com, and others.
With Pixer.us you can edit your photos online using only your browser. You can apply functions like saturation, colorfx, blur and sharpen, brightness and contrast.

Pixenate is online photo editing software that you can use stand-alone or integrate into an existing photo-sharing or photo-printing website. If you provide a photo-based web service, Pixenate can significantly enhance the ’stickiness’ of your website by offering an easy-to-use integrated photo editor that doesn’t require your users to download and install additional software.

OnlinePhotoTool allows you to edit and save your images, screenshots and photos online. The following functions are possible: resize, crop, add text, sharpen, rotate, flip, colour balance, saturation, levels, paint, add icons, sepia, black and white.

With XMG Image you can host, edit, organize, and share your images with ease. XMG Image gives you the ability to manipulate your images in any way possible. Do simple functions like, crop, rotate, resize, and constrain images with 1-click. More advanced features include, advanced effects, image enhancing and more.

Photo Mixing and Slide Shows

Slide is the largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers. It helps people express themselves and tell stories through personalized photos and videos created on Slide.com and viewed anywhere on the web or desktop.

RockYou offers free services, including slide show creation, photo hosting, photo enhancement and more. RockYou is free.

Mixercast allows to create professional multimedia experiences by mixing your images, video, and sound easily with our unique templates and share across the web in one click.

Flektor hosts your photos, videos, and music. You can make customized slide shows, polls, text, or direct and edit your own movie with hundreds of effects and next generation glitter graphics all online. You can record or even broadcast yourself live on a webcam. When you’re done, post them on MySpace profile layout and comments, Facebook, Blogger, Digg, Photobucket…or any other website of your choice.

Mobile

With Shozu you can get videos, photos and music on and off your phone. ShoZu is free to download. You can do things on the move. No waiting for stuff to get to your phone.

Radar send you picture to Radar as a picture message or email, and your chosen friends can instantly see and comment upon it from any phone or PC.

Fotochatter allows to share mobile pictures with your friends, get images from your friends right on your phone, send and receive photo comments and messages, save any photo to your phone as wallpaper. It’s free and it works on any carrier in any country.

SnapZone take a snap on your mobile, send it to Snapzone and instantly share it with friends and family. You can manage your mobile photos online and share them from a personalized web address: (e.g. www.snapzone.com/yourname). Register FREE and start sharing your photos on the web.

Photo Printing and Book Creation

Moo can help you turn your virtual contents into excellent print products. You can make note cards and mini cards from your photos and design. These can be used for promotional materials or business cards.

Use Shutterfly for free to organize and edit your pictures. You can get 2 Web addresses to showcase your pictures. Save with Shutterfly Studio -4×6 prints for 12¢ each.

Fotki provides free unlimited photo hosting for sites, blogs, auctions and emails. Enjoy the best prices: 9 cent pro quality prints! Besides, you can participate in photo contests.

Snapfish -is a leading online photo service with more than 40 million members and one billion unique photos stored online. It enables the members to share, print and store their most important photo memories at the lowest prices - online or off. Snapfish offers professionally-developed digital camera prints as low as 10¢, film developing for just $2.99 per roll, free online photo sharing, unlimited online photo storage, free editing tools and software, wireless imaging services, and more than 80 personalized photo products, ranging from calendars, mugs and mouse pads, to boxer shorts, and dog leashes.

Photography Blogs

DPreview is a place where you can find all the latest digital photography and imaging news, reviews of the latest digital cameras and accessories, the most active discussion forums, a large selection of sample galleries, a digital camera database and buyers guide and the most comprehensive database of digital camera features and specifications.

Thomas Hawk - Zooomr’s Thomas Hawk on photography, Zooomr, Flickr and general tech news.

PhotoCritic - an excellent DIY photography Web blog.

Chromasia a blog where you can find photographs in a wide range of subjects and topics in a unique and contemporary style: scenes from the Fylde Coast (in and around Blackpool), items washed up on the shore, portraits of children and adults, a range of abstract things and scenes, and a variety of other topics.

Stuck In Customs - blog by one of the greatest HDR photographers on the net.

Black and White Photography is a great photo blog focusing on black and white photos.

Shutterlog - a photo blog designed and fed by Stéphane Alaimo.

Photo Search

PicSearch - image search with special options - you can choose to search only black and white or color photos.

YotoFoto indexes images in the public domain or available for free usage under various forms of copy left licensing.

Google Image Search remains one of the best ways to find images of any kind on the web.

Pixsy - is an image search engine that provides PixsyPower, a custom video and photo search for your own site.

EveryStockPhoto is a search engine for creative commons photos. It is aimed to be a community for designers, developers, photographers and other media publishers who want better, easier access to license-specific media on the web.

Posted by Techmagazine

Posted in Photoshop, Web tools 2 Comments »

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