Smarter Stuff

Why Apple Will Win The Flash Battle.

For whatever reason, Apple has opted not to allow Flash on the iPhone or iPad.

Here's why they will be able to make that stick:

1. Apple's iPhone and iPad owners don't care about Flash - they care about being able to watch video on their device.
2. The suppliers of video content don't care about the delivery technology - they care about being able to deliver their content to large groups of people.
3. Apple users are important to video suppliers as visible, vocal, trend-setting consumers.

As a result, the video suppliers will (sooner or later) convert their content to a format suitable for the iPhone and iPad.  The cost of conversion is small, certainly on a going-forward basis.

Yes, this analysis ignores other uses of Flash, e.g. casual games like Desktop Tower Defender.  But most of the conversation around Flash has been its use as a standard method for video distribution on the Web.

Moving From Blogger To Movable Type 5

For the longest time, the Who2.com blog has been Blogger-based, making use of their FTP-publishing option (I'm part of the Who2 tech team).

Unfortunately, that option is being eliminated on May 1st of this year (2010).  So, we had to find another option.  After due consideration, we decided to convert from Blogger to Movable Type (MT).

There are some published methods for converting from Blogger to Movable Type, but they all appear to be based on using the Archive function and a template.

I'd like to offer this alternative method,  based on backing up your Blogger blog into the Atom Publishing Format (as opposed to exporting an archive), and a Perl program which I wrote.  It doesn't require you to change settings, change templates, or re-publish.

To back up your Blogger blog, begin by logging into your Blogger account.  Then click on Settings:

At the top of the Settings page, you'll see an option to Export Your Blog:

 

The next page has a big download button which will put the exported data on your hard drive:

 

At this point, you're half-done.  You should have a file like blog-03-31-2009.xml  on your hard drive.

Now all you have to do is run it through BloggerToMovableType.pl:

$ BloggerToMovableType.pl blog-03-31-2010.xml > mtimport.txt

The resulting mtimport.txt  file should be placed in the import subdirectory of your MovableType installation.

All that remains now is to import your blog using MovableType's import function:

This version doesn't  export Pings from Blogger (the logical translation is to MT trackbacks), and Blogger labels are imported as MT tags (not categories).

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