| Testing if hostname is numeric IPv4Posted on August 31, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under iphone, mobile, python, technology I had to resort this hack when testing a hybrid web/mobile site which uses site hostname based device discrimination. In production mode we can have m.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com hostnames. However, when running the site locally, on your development computer and in LAN this does not work very well: one cannot spoof hostnames for web browsers in devices like iPhone/iPod/other mobile phone unless you install a DNS server. And installing a DNS server for LAN is something you don’t want to do… So, I figured out that I can use hostname spoofing on desktop computers (/etc/hosts file) and I always access the site via numeric IP (IPv4 over ethernet) when testing over WLAN on mobile devices.
And,… dadaa,… here is my magical code to test whether hostname is numeric IPv4. I couldn’t find a ready function from Python standard library import re
ipv4_regex_source = "^(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)$"
ipv4_regex = re.compile(ipv4_regex_source)
def is_numeric_ipv4(str):
"""
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/318-how-to-match-ipv4-addresses-with-regular-expressions/
@param str: Hostname as a string.
@return: True if the given string is numeric IPv4 address
"""
# ^(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)$
return ipv4_regex.match(str)
Looking for free icons?Posted on April 17, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under iphone, mobile, technology, web development Check out this Smashing Magazine article with 50 free icons set. Then there is 14 free mobile application icon set by Speckyboy design magazine. Ps. Please if you have any good free icon set tips share them in the comments
Building a mobile site and applications with Django and PythonPosted on September 30, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, django, iphone, linux, mobile, pys60, python, technology 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
Software stack
Development effortDevelopment 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 SEO tips: query strings, multiple languages, forms and other content management system issuesPosted on August 7, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under plone, technology This post is collection of search engine optimization tips for content management systems, especially for Plone. Do not index query stringsIt 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
Also, “almost” human readable query strings look ugly in the address bar… Top level domains and languagesUsing 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 formsPlone 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 navigationAny 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 protocolCrawlers 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 toolsGoogle 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> metadataSearch engines mostly ignore <meta> tags besides title so there is no point of trying fine-tune them. Example robots.txtHere 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
XHTML mobile profile transformer and cleaner for PythonPosted on July 23, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under mobile, plone, python, technology Mobile phones, and especially mobile site validators, are very picky about the validy of XHTML. It must not be any XHTML, but special mobile profile XHTML. Also, search engines like Google, will punish you in the mobile search results if your site fails to conform to mobile profile. This is especially troublesome if you display external content (RSS feeds, ATOM feeds) on your mobile site. Incoming HTML cannot be guaranteed to follow any specification. To solve this problem, we have created gomobile.xhtmlmp Python library which helps you to transform any HTML to content to valid XHTML MP. The library is piloted on plonecommunity.mobi site which uses aggregated content from varying sources. The library is based on lxml.html.Cleaner. The library is part of GoMobile project which aims to create world class Python mobile web development tools. Highlights
As an example we integrated gomobile.xhtmlmp to Feedfeeder Plone add-on product. Enjoy. How to optimize your mobile site visibilityPosted on July 14, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, mobile 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! Plone goes mobilePosted on July 9, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, plone, technology FYI Plone GoMobile project. plonecommunity.mobi demo site. More to come. pygame goes mobilePosted on December 17, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under mobile, python, technology Pygame, the easiest way to make computer games in the world, has just reached your pocket. Check our announcement at http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=152969 planetmobile.us up and runningPosted on September 25, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under mobile planetmobile.us is a blog aggregator focused on mobile software development.The purpose of the aggregator is to give all good blogs in one packet, without the need to hunt them individually. planetmobile.us was managed by Christopher Schmidt until I resurrected it few weeks ago. Please feel free to subscribe your feed to the planet! How to encode h264 video files for Nokia Series 60 standalone playbackPosted on September 23, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under linux, mobile, series 60, ubuntu Bored with Spiderman 3 which came with your Nokia N95 8 GB? This guide shortly tells how to get movies into your N95 on Ubuntu Linux using ffmpeg video encoder. The aim is to encode video suitable for playback from Nokia N-series (N95, N78, others) mobile phone memory card. We use h264 + AAC codecs which provides the best quality/compression rate for Nokia phones currently. Ubuntu does not distribute proprietary codes. First thing you need to do is to rebuild ffmpeg. Since Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron ships with ffmpeg from 2007, which is aeons old in video codec years, you need to build libx264 and ffmpeg from SVN sources. Here are detailed, valid, instructions. Note that FFMPEG trunk is not currently stable (September 2008), so you need to use revision 15261 which needs this little patch. Indeed, this is a very difficult month to start your career in the dark world of video encoders. To make it legal and support open source codec development, please pay for your codecs. Then we use this guide by Robert Swain. We have a tiny sub 2,4″ screen, we do not care about the quality and do one pass encoding. By empirical research, I have found that the following MPEG-4 profile parameters are compatible with N95 8 GB and provide the optimal result. You can vary video and audio bitrate depending on your taste. Here is a script which recursivelu encodes all detected video files suitable for mobile format: #!/bin/sh
#
# Optimal movie encoding for Nokia N-series mobile phones
#
# Copyright 2008 Red Innovation Ltd.
#
# Say hi if you find this useful.
# We do some professional mobile video publishing, so if you
# need a helping hand please call us.
#
# Usage: Run encode.sh in any folder and all video files are recursively converted to mobile phone suitable format
#
# Note: We expect all the source material be in 16:9 aspect ration
#
# Also see http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=support,search,faq,general,video%20encoding,53848
#
VIDEO_BITRATE=300k
AUDIO_BITRATE=72k
# Assume locally build ffmpeg + x264 in /usr/local/bin
# http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
# Search all source AVI, MPG and WMV video files
# Place all encoded files to the same folder with the source, with added .mp4 extension
find . -iname "*.avi" -or -iname "*.wmv" -or -iname "*.mpg" | while read src ; do
srcfile=`basename "$src"`
srcfolder=`dirname "$src"`
dstfile="$srcfolder"/"$srcfile".mp4
# The magical string!
# Size and cropping is for 16:9 source material, so that 320:240 display will have black bars.
# Fex pixels off... note that h264 sizes must be multiplies of 16, use 256x144 for streaming
# N95 RealMedia player does not seem to respect MPEG-4 embedded aspect ration info.
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i "$srcfile" -acodec libfaac -ab $AUDIO_BITRATE -s 320x176 -aspect 16:9 -vcodec libx264 -b $VIDEO_BITRATE -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 16 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -subq 7 -refs 6 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -sc_threshold 40 -me_range 12 -i_qfactor 0.71 -directpred 3 "$dstfile"
done
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