It has been very quiet around here for a while – over two years have passed since our last blog entry. Now we’re redefining, tightening and updating PavingWays and we made some changes to our blog too.
We transferred the old pavingways.com from a self-hosted and heavily modified WordPress installation to a Jekyll/Octopress blog on GitHub Pages. The page is additionally delivered through CloudFlare as we had CF set up before and it had proven to be reliable and fast.
The whole migration process went relatively smoothly however I had to make some adjustments here and there.
Before we settled with Octopress I tried Ghost and Jekyll directly, so it was clear I would need to have our old posts as Markdown files or HTML if everything else would fail.
So I wrote a PHP script that exported all of our old WordPress posts to Markdown files using an old PHP class called Markdownify. Trouble was that this class needed way too many adjustments and I never was satisfied with the results, so I discarded wanting to have ALL posts in Markdown and decided to go with the Jekyll importer which produces HTML files. The process looked simple and roughly goes like this:
Guess what … this did not work and first I got this:
$ jekyll import wordpress --source pavingways.wordpress.2014-01-05.xml
Could not require 'htmlentities', so the :clean_entities option is now disabled.
error: LoadError: cannot load such file -- mysql2. Use --trace to view backtrace
This is caused by some missing gems and you should “gem install” htmlentities
, sequel
, mysql
and mysql2
just to be sure.
Some more playing around with this revealed that apparently the command line suggested on the Jekyll importer page is/was simply wrong see my bug report: The importer consists of several sub-importers for various systems and for wordpress there are two – one for self-hosted blogs and one for blogs on wordpress.com.
I had no local DB of my old blog at hand – unfortunately the wordpress importer requires one in contrast to above command line example. That was initially not clear to me and I already had my WXR file …
And so I went with the wordpressdotcom
importer, also because I found a blog post on the matter and tried another command line (also contained in the Jekyll importer docs) which works:
$ruby -rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import"; JekyllImport::Importers::WordpressDotCom.run({ "source" => "pavingways.wordpress.2014-01-05.xml" })'
Basically I could also have done this and had saved some time, oh well:
$ jekyll import wordpressdotcom --source pavingways.wordpress.2014-01-05.xml
Now I had all my files in _posts as I wanted. My remaining issues with the wordpressdotcom importer were as follows:
/{post_name}_{ID}.html
.date
field in their head sectioncomments
field in their head section<br>
sIn my first stab at Ruby source code ever since I read this Rails book in 2005 I changed the jekyll-import Gem (the file is called wordpressdotcom.rb
) so it did all of the above and finally I was happy with my old post files.
Some changes to the default Octopress theme and (S)CSS I had a working site and especially all of our old blog posts on GitHub.
The same WXR file I used for importing our old post can be used to import all comments to Disqus. Details see this blog post again. The import worked alright, however I did not see any comments in the Disqus box below our posts.
Apparently Disqus and CloudFlare don’t just work together as planned and so I followed this post and It worked – unfortunately only partly…
As it turns out I had to do a domain migration in Disqus (Discussions –> Tools) in order to see all my old comments.
Strangely this required me to migrate from my (unchanged) domain pavingways.com
to pavingways.github.io
so they now appear in Disqus like this:
http://pavingways.github.io/new-year-new-blog.html
I had no time digging deeper but apparetly disqus realizes that my page is hosted on GitHub. Finally all comments show up and we have a working blog again.
Octopress’ rake commands make it now simple and easy to write/debug posts and deploy them to GitHub.
Happy New Year!
]]>(1) 1. United States
(2) 2. Germany
(4) 3. United Kingdom
(3) 4. Italy
(5) 5. Canada
(6) 6. Netherlands
(7) 7. France
(8) 8. Hong Kong
(9) 9. Spain
(13) 10. Australia
Position in () was in April/2011
Top 5 growing countries for May 2011:1. Australia (74.1% Growth over April/2011)
2. Hong Kong (43.3%)
3. United States (39.0%)
4. France (32.2%)
5. United Kingdom (31.5%)
The first presentation on the “Asia Pacific Mobile & LBS Outlook” was held by Marc Einstein from the market research company Frost & Sullivan. His presentation (PDF) gave a lot of statistical insights in different regions in Asia. Asia in general is a very competitive market especially for mobile operators. In India alone there are around 15 operators and Indonesia, also a very interesting market for mobile services, has 11 mobile operators. Indonesia is also the third largest region worldwide (after US and UK) for Facebook usage on mobile devices. Contrary to Indonesia, in Japan the biggest mobile social network is Mixi with over 21 million users and in South Korea it is Cyworld (18 million users).
Smartphones are getting more popular in the Asian Pacific region. In 2009 there were nearly 22 million smartphone devices, representing 4.5% of all devices sold in this region. Frost & Sullivan expect a robust growth in smartphone sales in the coming years.
Location based services are also big in Japan, especially when talking about maps and navigation. NTT Docomo’s most used LBS are maps/navigation too, also things like finding family members and friends. But interestingly names like Gowalla or Foursquare were missing in all the talks. So maybe it is why mobile users in Japan are more bound to their carrier portal or such services do not have the attraction than in other places. It could be a language thing too.
After Marc’s presentation Takeshi Mitsutani introduced us to deCarta, an independent LBS software platform. Opera for example uses deCarta instead of Google Maps for maps and local search. Their goal is to reach about 100 million users in this co-operation and share the revenue through advertisment with Opera.
Samsung also integrated deCarta’s data into Bada to provide developer a location API. deCarta wants to reach up to 50 million users by 2011 there. Their model: revenue share of paid apps and advertisement revenue share on free apps.
The company also provides its navigation application to Medion and T-Mobile in Germany.
The third presentation was held by Hiroaki Kando from ZENRIN DataCom. They aim to be a leading service provider for location data and map content and they offer an easy-to-use real-time interface (so they claim). Their location based services “itsmo” is preinstalled on NTT Docomo’s phones for providing users with train or alternative route information, e.g. underground routes for when it is raining or if you want to take a shopping detour. The service is also available on the iPhone and was the best selling app in Japan in 2009.
The final presentation was from the US company Skyhook, a Wi-Fi Positioning System. The Core Engine SDK is available for Android, Symbian as well as Windows Mobile and is already integrated by apps like Layar or Kayak. Skyhook wants to look into the future by predicting human behavior through analyzing previously collected data. They also want to make this available to application developers - your privacy alert should have turned on by now ;)
Then the networking part started. The crowd was pretty mixed: American, German, English, Danish, French, Chinese even some Japanese and probably some more nationalities mixed up to talk mobile - quite an experience and again quite different from our previous MobileMonday experiences in the US and Germany.
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