So I went to a Hackathon sponsored by Symbian at Jillians yesterday. Fun event, they gave out phones for people to create apps on and then take home. I got a Nokia E75, and it looked like they were giving out Nokia 5800s earlier. I also won a Flip HD camcorder for the widget I created.

The Web Runtime platform is really easy to work with once you get things set up. Although one thing that would have been nice to have at the event would have been a simple handout with instructions how to setup the dev environment and create a Hello World app.

I used to develop J2ME apps for Series 60 ages ago, and that’s one thing that is difficult with Nokia is finding what you need just to get started. Since there are so many Nokia platforms, it’s tough to find the right place for information, plus Forum Nokia is filled with all kinds of legacy information that, while correct at one time, is not necessary still valid, so it’s pretty confusing.

I’ll write up a separate “Getting Started with WRT” article in a separate post based on the things I found. The easiest way to develop for me was to work mostly within Aptana with the WRT plugin. For thornier debugging, I used Firefox and Firebug. Finally I ignored the emulators and deployed to the phone via bluetooth for device testing. I’ll detail this more elsewhere.

The Symbian Web Runtime itself is a killer mobile platform. I mean it’s just html/javascript/AJAX, stuff that’s second nature to most people by now. After working with J2ME, Android, and iPhone/Cocoa, it’s refreshing to be able to work this way.

The biggest surprise for me was how easy it is to get location information through Javascript. I know a lot of web developers who have cool ideas for location-based mobile apps, but they’re scared off by having to learn new technologies (cocoa, java, etc.). WRT is perfect for them.

There was one issue, though, that I ran into took a lot of time to figure out. I’ll describe it here just in case someone else runs into the same problem and stumbles upon this page.

Symptoms: Unable to install my widget on the phone. I succeeded in pairing my phone and macbook via bluetooth and successfully sent my widget to the phone. After opening up the message on the phone, the installation started properly then goes directly to “Installation Complete” or something like that. There was never a prompt asking whether I want to install directly on the phone or the card as expected.

Other Clues: After opening up Applications, the icon for my widget isn’t there. But when I go to the App Manager, there are two entries for my widget for me to uninstall.

Solution: It turned out to be a problem in my setup. Even though I was deploying my widget over bluetooth, I had my phone connected to my laptop through a USB cable. (since it was just out of the box, I thought I needed to charge it up, but later realized it was already charged. I’m not sure why it made a difference, but removing the USB connection allowed the widget to install smoothly.

So I’ve been away for a while for the last year and a half. Family health issues pulled me away, but things are mostly better now.

But I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things again after dropping off the face of the earth. Things have really gotten interesting in the mobile space in the last 1.5 years. It was probably the least ideal time to take a hiatus.

Anyway, I left a lot of abandoned projects behind, but I’ve got a few concepts in the pipeline that have really got me fired up.

[whoops, I wrote this a while ago, but forgot to post it.]

So, in the back of my mind I had been kind of avoiding phpBB. Maybe it was because of all the complaints about spammer problems, complicated permissions, or security issues.

Or maybe becuase phpBB is kind of the juggernaut of this space (free php forums). You can go with the status quo or hang with the cool kids at SMF, or the even cooler kids at myBB.

Checking out the SEO mod options, I found a nice page to roll your own, but I’m kind of a lazy bastard and was hoping to avoid all that.

SEO Mod

This mod looks really good. The only downside I noticed was it doesn’t eliminate duplicate URLs.

Magic SEO URL

This one costs money, but, frankly, it left me scratching my head. The demo board seems good enough with nice looking URLs. But the main site gave off a weird vibe, like it was for a fake site or was hocking an infomercial product.

It set off my engineer’s spider sense, like it was written by a marketing person with minimal contact with the programmer that wrote the product. (Actually, now that I look at the site again, it looks like it’s originally a Czech product, so I’m guessing a lot of the text on the English site was lost in transation.)

phpBB SEO

At this point, in the back of my mind, I was still thinking I would go with SMF or myBB and seriously tweak their existing mods. That thought ended when I saw the stuff at phpbb-seo.

If I worked full-time on an SEO mod for SMF or myBB, it still wouldn’t be as good as the mod at phpbb-seo. They actually have three different versions depending on how much effort you want to put into it. Simple, Mixed, and Advanced.

When looking at the previous seo mods, I kept thinking of “nice-to-have” features. After combining their Advanced SEO, Zero duplicate, Dynamic Meta Tag, and Optimal title mods, I couldn’t think of anything else to add. (granted, with SMF and probably myBB, the Meta tags and page titles are already pretty good by default).

Looking at phpBB SEO Admin page, here are some of the settings that you can tweak to your heart’s delight:

Profiles and groups injection: Yes [x] No [ ]
nickname-uxx.html instead of memberxx.html.

Virtual folder Profiles: Yes [ ] No [x]
phpBB/nickname-uxx/(topics/) or phpBB/memberxx/(topics/) instead of
phpBB/nickname-uxx(-topics).html and phpBB/memberxx(-topics).html.

Profiles ID removing: Yes [x] No [ ]
example.com/phpBB/member/nickname instead of the default
example.com/phpBB/nickname-uxx.html.

Common Search and User messages pages rewriting: Yes [x] No [ ]
phpBB/messages/nickname/topics/
VS phpBB/nickname-uxx-topics.html
VS phpBB/memberxx-topics.html.

SID Removing: Yes [x] No [ ]
SID will be removed from 100% of the URLs passing through the phpbb_seo class, for guests thus bots.

Highlights Removing: Yes [x] No [ ]
Highlights will be removed from 100% of the URLs passing through the phpbb_seo class, for guests thus bots.

Remove small words: Yes [x] No [ ]
Allow to remove all words of less than three letters in rewritten URLs.

Virtual Folder: Yes [ ] No [x]
forum-title-fxx/topic-title-txx.html VS topic-title-txx.html

Virtual Root: Yes [ ] No [x]
phpBB3/forum-title-fxx/topic-title-txx.html VS
forum-title-fxx/topic-title-txx.html

Forum URL caching: Yes [x] No [ ] (YES!!!!)
Turns on the cache for forum URLs and allow to separate forum titles from their URL
Example :
forum-title-fxx/ VS any-title-fxx/

Forum ID Removing: Yes [x] No [ ] (YES!!!!)
Get rid of the IDs and delimiters in forum URLs. Only apply if Forum URL caching is activated.
Example :
any-title-fxx/ VS any-title/

Activate the Zero duplicate: Yes [x] No [ ]

Strict Mode: Yes [ ] No [x]

Posts Redirections:
This option will determine how to handle post urls; it can take four values:
* off, do not redirect post url, whatever the case,
* post, only make sure postxx.html is used for a post url,
* guest, redirect guests if required to the corresponding topic url rather than to the postxx.html, and only make sure postxx.html is used for logged users,
* all, redirect if required to the corresponding topic url.