| 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
Scripting Google analytics for multidomain sitePosted on July 15, 2009 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under plone, technology We are running few Plone sites which use top level domain (TLD) to identify the site language. Like many other CMSs out there, Plone has only one box to enter Google Analytics script snippet. It is often desirable to use different tracker for different domain and different language combinations, but Google itself doesn’t provide any fancy generator to create complex page tracking code. Page tracker code, though looks little difficult when spit out by Google Analytics, is just normal Javascript. You can make the condition to choose the appropriate page tracker id in Javascript itself using document.location property and this way you don’t need to mess with your page templates to create separate tracking Javascript snippet slots. Here is an example what you can toss in to Plone site setup -> site -> JavaScript for web statistics support: <script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
// Choose page tracker id according to domain
var domains = document.location.hostname.split(".");
var tld = domains[domains.length-1];
if(tld == "fi") {
// .fi
pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-8819100-1");
} else {
// .com
pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-8819100-4");
}
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {
}
</script>
This is used on www.twinapex.com and www.twinapex.fi sites. Use console.log(err) to output possible Javascript in catch {} errors using Firebug. Designing a high usability Plone themePosted on September 12, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Plone (old) This is my brain dump of instructions for artists how to design good Plone themes. I hope I can receive some comments, some feedback from the artists itself and then publish this as a plone.org tutorial. Often external artist is used to design a site theme. Artists might or might not have seen Plone, artists might or might not have any basic usability know how. This article should explain the elements which “must be there” to make a match between the theme and Plone easily. The basic layoutThis document describes the elements of multilingual high usability Plone theme. It is based on fluid div layout, meaning that the content stays very readable on small screens or when CSS is not loaded (screen readers). See the example layout. The layout must not break down when user is using non-default font size. E.g. all element accept two rows text, even if the default case is usually one row. Plone layoutHere we are designing a “normal” site theme where Plone is used to publish textual content for external readers. This might not always be the case – for example if Plone is used as a professional tool one might want to use all available screen space to display as much as possible action shortcuts to make the tool to quick to use. The latter is actual case I have seen in medical applications. Plone layout is formed by seven main parts.
The layout must be designed so that
Alternative layout casesThe layout must be formed from such a blocks that left or right portlets can be easily dropped without breaking the layout. Right portlets missing:
Both portlets missing (front page view):
Header elementsThe header should have the following elements
The header must scale between 780 – 1280 px. Section navigation tabs may trigger drop down menus, see http://www.jyu.fi/ Content area elementsThe content area contains
The whole portlet section can be dropped, making space for the content. PortletsPortlets are boxes on the left and right side of the content containing section specific actions. Example portlets:
The portlet consists of
See http://www.siggraph.org/ for creative use of portlets. Footer elementsThe footer has
The footer must scale between 780 – 1280 px. Complete picture
Special casesThese are often required and might shoot you into a foot
ColorsPlone uses mechanism to have color variables in CSS. See base_properties.prop to get an idea what colors there are and try to guess how they are used. IconsPlone uses generic icon mechanism to apply icons to any action available on site. Icons are 16×16, transparent with one pixel transparent border leaving 14×14 pixels for the content. The icons should preferably be suitable for dark and light backgrounds. This might be hard to achieve, though, so it is suitable to use ligh background icons, since this is the Plone default. Actions
Language flagsPlone default flags can be used
Content iconsThese reflect different Plone content types
Link iconsPlone uses Javascript to apply special icons for external links
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