Building a mobile site and applications with Django and Python

Recently we created a mobile site for an interactive bicycle tour. oulugo.mobi (you need to use mobile browser to access the site or you’ll get a redirect) is a multimedia enriched bicycle tour through the historic parts of the city of Oulu. All content is provided by OnGo.

The route, which you can bicycle through is drawn on Google Maps. There are nine  action points where the user can listen to streaming audio clips, with still images, in his/her mobile phone. This is sort of  augmented reality experience: The user sees the real world (where he/she is now bicycling) combined with the historic events (audio playback narrative). For example, at Linnansaari (a location on the route) you’ll see the actual 17th century castle ruins and the narrator tells how the castle exploded when fire, caused by a lighting, reached gunpowder warehouse… boom. The explosion caused stones fly over 400 meters.

Alternatively, the clips are available as podcasts from Oulu Tourism pages. You can download them into your iPod for offline listening and use in conjuction with a paper map. This demostrates interesting mix of multichannel publishing: paper, web, mobile and podcasts.

The tour is bilingual in Finnish and English.

There exists unreleased iPhone application, based on PhoneGap, which allows the user to track his/her location real-time on the web page. We didn’t see it worth of trouble to go through Apple iPhone application review process. When location based service support comes for the browser this feature is indended to be included as the standard HTML5 feature of the service.

There also exists Nokia Series 60 mobile application, based on PyS60 and Series 60 BrowserControl API, which allows the user to track his/her location in real-time. The application provides wrapper around Series 60 WebKit control and allows Javascript to access phone native functions (GPS) over localhost socket communication. Like with Apple, we didn’t see real-time tracking feature interesting enough to go through Symbian Signed process to get our application released. Also, BrowserControl had seriousquality problems and we didn’t consider it stable enough for the end users. Some work is available in PyS60 Community Edition repository.

The service is hosted on Python specific virtual server on Twinapex services server farm.

Features

• Premium content tailored for audio listening
• Dubbed in English and Finnish by a professional voice actor
• Bilingual: English/Finnish
• Adapts for smartphones (WebKit based browsers) and low end phones (XHTML mobile profile browsers)
• Streaming video and audio (RTSP / progressive HTTP download forv iPhone). Different audio quality is provided on depending on the handset features.
• Screen resolution detection based on user agent sniffing. Three different version of images are used.
• Custom Google Maps component for mobile is used. The component adapts for different mobile phones based on sniffing. Features include zoom, show action point, show the current location, search street address name. This component can be published on a request.
• Management interface features include video upload, video transcoding different mobile versions and editing bilingual content
• Apex Vertex handset database is used to detect the user’s mobile phone capabilities
• Apex Vertex logging and traffic analytics capabilities are used for the site statistics

Software stack

• Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron virtual server
• Apache 2.2 / mod_python
• Python 2.5
• Django 1.0
• Django-CMS 1.0
• mobile.sniffer Python package to provide abstraction over different handset databases
• Apex Vertex streaming solution (RTSP based on Darwin streaming server by Apple)
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor
• Darwin streaming server
• ExtJS is extensively used in Apex Vertext management interface

Development effort

Development time: Around 100 hours. Three different developers where involved. Used development tools: Eclipse, PyDev, Subclipse, Subversion. There were around five meetings between the content provider and the technology provider. Few beta testing rounds using iPhone application were performed by bicycling in -10 celcius degrees weather (north and so on…). No polar bears were harmed during the creation of this mobile service.

The service is linked in from Oulu Tourism pages and thousands of paper brochures printed for Oulu summer season 2009.

About the author Mikko Ohtamaa

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SEO tips: query strings, multiple languages, forms and other content management system issues

This post is collection of search engine optimization tips for content management systems, especially for Plone.

Do not index query strings

It is often desirable to make sure that query string pages (http://yoursite/page?query_string_action=something) do not end up into the search indexes. Otherwise search bots might index pages like site’s own search engine results  (yoursite/search?SearchableText=…) lowering the visibility of  actual content pages.

GoogleBot has regex support in robots.txt and can be configured to ignore any URL ? in it. See the example below.

Query string indexing causes the crawler crawl things like

• Various search results (?SearchableText)
• Keyword lists (?Subject)
• Language switching code (?set_language)… making set_language appear as the document in the search results

Also, “almost” human readable query strings look ugly in the address bar…

Top level domains and languages

Using top level domain name (.fi for Finland, .uk for United Kingdoms, and so on.) to make distinction between different languages and areas is optimal solution from the SEO point of view. Search engines use TLD information to reorder the search results based on where  the search query is performed  (there is difference between google.com and google.fi results).

Plone doesn’t use any query strings for content pages. Making robots to ignore query strings is especially important if you are hosting multilingual site and you use top level domain name (TLD) to separate languages: if you don’t configure robots.txt to ignore ?set_language links only one of your top level domains (.com, .fi, .xxx) will get proper visibility in the search results. For example we had situation where our domain www.twinapex.fi did not get proper visibility because Google considered www.twinapex.com?set_language=fi as the primary content source (accessing Finnish content through English site and  language switching links).

Shared forms

Plone has some forms (send to, login) which can appear on any content page. These must be disallowed or otherwise you might have a search result where the link goes to the form page instead of the actual content page.

Hidden content and content excluded from the navigation

Any content excluded from the sitemap navigation  should be put under disallowed in robots.txt. E.g. if you check “exclude from navigation” for Plone folder remember to update robots.txt also.

In our case, our internal image bank must not end up being indexed, though images themselves are visible on the site. Otherwise you get funny search result: if you search by person’s name the photo will be the first hit instead of biography.

Sitemap protocol

Crawlers use Sitemap protocol to help determining the content pages on your site (note: sitemap seems to be used for hinting only and it is not authoritative).  Since version 3.1 Plone can automatically generate sitemap.xml.gz. You still need to register sitemap.xml.gz in Google webmaster tools manually.

There exists a sitemap protocol extension for mobile sites.

Webmaster tools

Google Webmaster tools enable you to monitor your site visibility in Google and do some search engine specific tasks like submitting sitemaps.

I do not know what kind of similar functionality other search provides have. Please share your knowledge in the blog comments regarding this.

HTML <head> metadata

Search engines mostly ignore <meta> tags besides title so there is no point of trying fine-tune them.

Example robots.txt

Here is our optimized robots.txt for www.twinapex.com:

# Normal robots.txt body is purely substring match only
# We exclude lots of general purpose forms which are available in various mount points of the site
# and internal image bank which is hidden in the navigation tree in any case
User-agent: *
Disallow: set_language
Disallow: login_form
Disallow: sendto_form
Disallow: /images

# Googlebot allows regex in its syntax
# Block all URLs including query strings (? pattern) - contentish objects expose query string only for actions or status reports which
# might confuse search results.
# This will also block ?set_language
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*folder_factories$

# Allow Adsense bot on entire site
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

Useful resources

• How Google treats HTML metatags. This is especially interesting considering Plone’s support for Dublin core metadata (title, description, keywords). Note: <meta> keywords are not indexed.
• Plone SEO add-on product
• SEO with robots.txt
• Sitemaps mobile protocol

How to optimize your mobile site visibility

SEOptimize has an interesting post containing lots of resources for mobile internet growth, mobile site search engine optimizations and mobile web design. Keep this under your pillow, mobile folks!