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Happy Birthday, GigaOm

by admin

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Om Malik’s love of labor has completed 2 years and we wish him and his team “Many Happy Returns”.

Moving from Typepad to Wordpress - How To ( Part 1 )

by Vic Podcaster

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In the last post on Moving from Typepad to Wordpress, I gave the outline of pains of migrating from Typepad to Wordpress. Lets continue where I left in the last post.

Lets talk about the following 5 issues and how I solved them here.

Typepad uses short weired urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s
Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t
Typepad blog name is problematic ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1’ - the second part ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after the slash in the URL host name is the name you choose when you were setting up your blog on Typepad.
All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com
All the file links and logo links are still pointing to typepad.com

1. Typepad uses short wiered urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s

Lets take an example for a post, url generated by Typepad is ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html’ while this post is imported in Wordpress, the URL generated by Wordpress would be ‘http:// hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/18/gps-that-never-fails/’ provided that permalinks are enabled in Wordpress. That is where wordpress slug feature comes to the rescue. Wordpress lets you manually assign a post slug to any post, which overrides automatically Wordpress generated SEO friendly post slug.

However, you have to manually open each post in wordpress and assign it a post slug manually. I copied the old Typepad post slug ‘gps_that_never_’ in the Post slug box on the post management page. Now the URL generated by Wordpress was ‘http:// hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/18/gps_that_never_/’. Looks like that we are getting closer.

2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t

Next step is adding .html at the end of all URL’s automatically and getting rid of that last ‘/’. Also in the posts URL structure Typepad is using /Year/Month/ while the default for Wordpress is /Year/Month/Day/, so will be dropping this /Day part from the URL generation as well.

We can achieve this simply by configuring the Wordpress’s permalink generating structure and customizing it. Tell Wordpress to generate custom structure using the following string ‘/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’. We have done 3 things here. We have removed the /%day% , added the .html to the end of each URL and removed the postfix ‘/’ from each URL.

After updating the Permalink structure, now the finished URL is ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html’ - Hurray, this is what we wanted.

3. Typepad blog name is problematic ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley’ - the second part ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after the ‘/’ in the URL host name is the name you choose when you were setting up your blog on Typepad.

Solution for this is very simple. I simple choose to install the Typepad software in a subdirectory named ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ instead of installing in the root web directory and that did the trick because automatically ads the subdirectory name as part of the URL.

Another way this problem could have been solved would be by modifying the permalink custom structure in Wordpress, if you had installed the wordpress in the web root directory of the server. The Custom Structure for permalinks would be ‘/hotfromsiliconvalley/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’, and that will inject ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after hostname in the URL.

4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com

For this the solution is a search and replace operation on the text file which was exported by Typepad. You have to this before you import this file in Wordpress. In your favorite text editor search for ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007’ and replace it with ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007’ throughout the document and that should do the trick. Repeat the same for all with the other years 2006, 2005 and so on. This ensures the image URL’s are not automatically replaced in this operation and they will continue to point to Typepad, which we can replace next.

To be continued in next post…

Moving from Typepad to Wordpress - pains and problems

by Vic Podcaster

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After initially starting out with ‘hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com’, for quite a while I’ve been using my own domain name ‘www.hotfromsiliconvalley.com’ for my Typepad blog, my first blog. When I decided to move from Typepad to Wordpress, I had thought that moving from the Typepad to Wordpress would be simple, easy and straight forward. Why - because Typepad allows you to export your whole blog to a text while, and Wordpress supports importing your Typepad blog. Since I owned my own domain name, I would retain my Google page-rank and all the inbound links will remain intact. Right? Oh! I was so very wrong.

If you are the text only blogger than nothing to worry about, provided you have your own custom domain name. Not me, well I use lot of audio (podcasts), photos and logos. I had approximately 300 media rich posts on my Typepad blog. Exporting the content of the blog from the Typepad in a human readable text file was the only easy part and takes less than a minute. Now I imported this text file in Wordpress by going to Manage - Import - Movable Type and TypePad, and volla, in less than 5 minutes, I had all my posts including comments and trackbacks show up in Wordpress. And that is where the easy part ends and my jaw drops. Why?

Typepad uses short weired urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s
Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t
Typepad blog name is problametic ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1’ - the second part ‘blog1’ after the slash is the name you choose when setting up your blog, and it is required that you have something here
All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com
All the file links and logo links are still pointing to typepad.com
Typepad uses /year/month/my_post_url.html format for generating URL’s while the wordpress permalink uses /year/month/day/my-post-url-that-is-seo-friendly
Typepad does not give me an option to export my media files
Typepad does not let me export my pictures (or I couldn’t find it at least)
Even though, I am using my custom domain name, all posts are still accessible using ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1′ url and there is no way to switch it off
Typepad does not allow me set up a permanent 301 redirect from old Typepad.com address to my mydomain.com

Basically Typepad is telling me not to leave and stay on Typepad.com for ever. If you do not have your own custom domain name like ‘yourdomain.com’, your blog link life will end here if you decide to migrate as all the links will become orphan, and you have to start all over again.

Well Wordpress came to the rescue. Many many thanks to Matt of Wordpress and the Wordpress community for making Wordpress so flexible. A few surgical tweaks in Wordpress, a few plugins for firefox, a few plugins for Wordpress and I was in business.

OpenSource rocks. Geeks rock. I am in love with Wordpress and FireFox. Wordpress Community and Firefox Community which helped with with the transition.

How I handled these pains, problems and issues?

To be continued in the next post…

Jitendra Mudhol is still on a blogging break

by Vic Podcaster

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Just to make sure that the readers are not confused, Jitendra Mudhol, who is contributing editor to Silicon Valley Blog, and writes about Wireless and Mobile technologies, is still on blogging break. He is spending some time in San Diego working on Cutting edge wireless technologies which you will get to play with in next couple of months.

Jitendra is lot of fun to be around and works as a bouncing board for new ideas. I am looking forward for him to be back in the valley soon.

Getting back to blogging

by Vic Podcaster

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I have been very very busy for last couple of months with my new venture and family. I am happy to report that the beta code for StartupNewz is ready now ( no major bugs) and we would be putting it in production this week. Keeping my fingers crossed. Finally things are in control again and it is time to get back to blogging.

You will notice that I am renovating the blog with new bells and whistles. There are more options in the sidebar now. For the folks who have pointed out that my feed was not burned, finally I took the plunge, and now you will notice that the feed is burned by Feedburner, though I have disabled many of the fancy options as it takes too many clicks to subscribe. ( but Please let me know, and I would enable the fancy options for subscribing to various fancy online readers.)

Also I have added the option to subscribing by email (via FeedBlitz) and long overdue MyBlogLog badges and profile. It looks lot cooler now.

The next step is to cutover the old “http://HotFromSiliconValley.com” to the Podcast section here. I hope to complete that in next one or two days as I have to shuffle around a bunch of audio files and would probably be using Amazon S3 for hosting the content.

I will keep you all in the loop. I am glad to be back.

Traveling and Blogging Break

by Jitendra Mudhol

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Folks, I am on a consulting tour and therefore my postings may be patchy for a while. Please bear with the silence.

Recent Carnival of the Mobilists

by Jitendra Mudhol

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Huff … Puff … once again trying to play catch-up …

Carnival of the Mobilists #120 is hosted by Skydeck. Click here to access the link.

Carnival of the Mobilists #121 is brought to you by 3lib. You can get to it here.

And finally, the Carnival of the Mobilists #122 comes to you from Xellular Identity here.

IEEE Workshop on WiMAX

by Jitendra Mudhol

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The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Santa Clara Valley Society organized its annual Short Course titled “WiMAX: Opportunities, Challenges and Concepts”, on Saturday 19 April 2008 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Auditorium.

Here are some of the highlights from the sessions:

Dr. Mohammed Sayed set the ball rolling with an introduction to the Workshop.

Delivering the keynote address titled, “WiMAX Technology Infrastructure Overview”, Intel Fellow Dr.Siavash Alamouti made an interesting case in favor of WiMAX over even LTE.
   - The next killer app: “anything that internet can provide and more”
   - If the future is all about mobile internet and ubiquitous access, then it is not about phones but about PCs that can
      provide a better experience to the user.
   - The walled gardens have lead to the failure of 3G.
   - The cell-phone world’s approach to providing high-speed data access just does not scale.
   - WiMAX has the potential to deliver, lives up to its hype.
   - Intel is forging ahead with its MID plans with WiFi/WiMAX chipsets.
   - The industry is finally moving away from TDMA/CDMA to OFDM + MIMO.
   - Comparing WiMAX and LTE: even though both end up in IP, one would go through more layers and
      proprietary protocols in case of the LTE.

Dr. Mohammed Shakouri of Alvarion, also the Chair of Marketing Working Group, WiMAX Forum spoke on the WiMAX Industry Trends. He gave a succinct snapshot of the current WiMAX scenario worldwide.
   - The WiMAX Forum now has about 530 members and that there are about 281 service providers currently working
      across the globe to deliver WiMAX services.
   - About 133 Million WiMAX users by 2013 (which is a higher number than the 80 Million in a previous post of mine)
   - With its internet business model with mobility, currently 3G and WiMAX can peacefully coexist.
   - But, will LTE and WiMAX coexist?

Presenting the business case for WiMAX, Doug Gray, a consultant to the WiMAX Forum covered aspects of deployment, estimating capacity requirements, CAPEX breakdowns and the sensitivity analysis with examples.
   - The spectrum licensing costs are actually a tiny fraction of the big picture.
   - Mobile WiMAX offers a base station solution at a low cost per Megabit.
   - It supports multiple usage models with multiple applications.
   - Mobile WiMAX significantly reduces the base station requirements in regions with high subscriber density.
   - On a per customer basis, the infrastructure cost would rise by more than $500 for a ‘greenfield’ operator instead
      of say, Sprint.

This was followed by a panel which was asked to provide their views on “WiMAX in 2013″.
   - Dr.Shakouri: flat rates would be most common five years from now
   - Tom Tofigh disagreed. He felt that flat rates would work for some while others would be willing to pay premium rates
      for customized services. He also called for seamless applications to work across different networks and devices.
   - Phil Lorch of Agilent was convinced that WiMAX has disruptive capability since it was built from grassroots.

The second half of the day was kicked off by Dr Raymond Pengelly of Cree Wireless Devices who spoke about the potential of GaN Transistors for amplifiers in WiMAX base stations.

This was followed by Tom Tofigh who chairs the WiMAX Forum Application Working Group, who spoke on “An Open Architecture for Application Deployment over WiMAX”. An end to end solution for WiMAX applications would work, with open platforms, open devices giving rise to interesting aspects such as role of QoE (Quality of Experience), multiple service classes, etc. A lot of very interesting opportunities are coming up to tap into the potential of moving from networking of networks to service based networks. I found his talk very engaging and well-researched.

David Huynh of Agilent wrapped it up with an introduction to the WiMAX Wave 2 testing, MIMO and Space Time Coding and a demo of the Agilent products/capabilities to testing WiMAX systems. In summary, it was a very well organized, informative and interactive day on a very hot topic. The setting provided for a number of interesting conversations which will lead me to more blog posts on related topics. Stay tuned. You can find details of the event, download presentations and check out the photos from the website of IEEE MTT Santa Clara Valley Society.

I would like to thank Dr. Mohammed Sayed for inviting me to this workshop. The event was sponsored by Agilent, Applied Wave Research, Computer Simulation Technology, MC Microwave, Rohde & Schwarz and Zeland Software.

Happy Birthday, GigaOm

Moving from Typepad to Wordpress - How To ( Part 1 )

Moving from Typepad to Wordpress - pains and problems

Jitendra Mudhol is still on a blogging break

Getting back to blogging

Traveling and Blogging Break

Recent Carnival of the Mobilists

IEEE Workshop on WiMAX

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