Ten days back Nikon announced their new flagship model, the Nikon D4. It’s clearly got a higher Megapixel value - as needed for marketing purposes. On the side it has gotten some long awaited features such as proper HD video recording with all the bells and whistles you’d expect. For more details listen to James Banfield below.

Dslrnewsshooter video: Nikon D4 - video feature run through from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

The most innovative feature in my perspective however is the Ethernet connection and what comes with it, a camera management console completely built in HTML and JS so one’s finally able to leave all the proprietary, heavily bloated, vendor specific crap software behind and focus on realizing ideas.

Checkout the video WHY by Corey Rich below if you want to see what’s possible with a D4 presumed you know what you’re doing.

WHY - Nikon D4 Release Video from Corey Rich on Vimeo.

A great read if you’re working on the next big thing yourself, because you’ll might need a team to work on it later.

Once you are no longer alone working on your project, the code you have written sets an example. - Philip Hofstetter

Also, I think it’s totally fine to hack together an initial version, hackathon style, you can improve later on however the structure, needs to be reasonably stable.

Right now I’ve already broken most of my New Years resolutions, I admit it. Why? - Well, I thought of me as a machine, meaning that I could easily deliver one hundred percent without an issue. In fact, that’s extremely unlikely to happen and I obviously knew that but I still made that promise with myself, you need to aim high right?. However, the impact it has by breaking resolutions or not reaching your goals makes you feel terrible or worse even makes you feel sorry for yourself. That’s why I recommend you watch this excellent talk by Tony Schwartz and start correcting your self expectations by stop wanting to prove yourself to others or yourself. It’s good to have goals but a weekly to do list has nothing to do with dreams just doable tasks.

via swiss-miss

During the last week well known bloggers have started turning off comments in a move to not having to care about sorting out SPAM and having more time for the actual writing. Matt Gemmell has written an excellent summary about this, for those of you interested.

While I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever do the same, I started wondering on how to realize something like a Link-Blog with Octopress. Turns out it’s pretty easy.

First modify the article.html inside source/_includes and exchange the lower <h1> part which is responsible for the page view title with an if-else clause.

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<h1 class="entry-title">
  {% if page.ref_url %}
    <a class="reference" href="{{ page.ref_url }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
  {% else %}
    {% if site.titlecase %}{{ page.title | titlecase }}{% else %}{{ page.title }}{% endif %}
  {% endif %}
</h1>

Then continue with adding an if-else clause to the atom.xml file too. Extend the <link> element inside the parent <entry> with the code below. Done.

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{% if post.ref_url %}
  <link href="{{ post.ref_url }}"/>
{% else %}
  <link href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
{% endif %}

If you want to create a Link-Blog post now, add ref_url to the markdown file header and Octopress takes care of the rest.

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---
layout: post
title: "This Awesome Article"
date: 2012-01-13 21:20
comments: true
ref_url: http://somesite.com/thisawesomearticle.html
---
This one is really great, check it out.

Alternatives

If Jekyll is too nerdy for you, then please checkout tumblr whose philosophy has been based on link-blogging for ages.

On the otherside if Octopress and therefore Ruby is still to cool for you to use then give the newly released Second Crack by Marco Arment a try. It’s also baking your markdown files to flat html ones, but it’s written in PHP.

(Sidenote: PHP and I were never really friends)

This is the second part of steps you have to take in order to migrate smoothly over to Jekyll, Octopress in my case, coming from BlogEngine land. I’d recommend you first have a look at moving your comments to disqus, before following this post.

Getting the “old data”

Log into your BlogEngine site and head over to Settings where you click on the Export button for BlogML. Now FTP or SSH into your server and get a complete dump of the App_Data/files folder onto your local machine.

Setup Octopress

Octopress? - Isn’t this tutorial for Jekyll? - you might ask. Well Octopress is built on top of Jekyll and brings some plugins and clever defaults to make your life easier. Start off by following the official Octopress Setup tutorial. If your working on an OS X machine you might want to consider installing POW since it’s making it much easier to work with Jekyll locally. Once POW is installed open your Terminal and go to ~/.pow and create a symlink to the octopress-repo root.

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$ ln -s /Users/yourUsername/Documents/octopress myapp

Now open http://myapp.dev in your browser to check if it’s working so far.

Import the “old data”

Create a folder _import inside the octopress/source directory and put the blogml.rb conversion file in there.

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$ cd octopress/source
$ mkdir _import
$ cd _import
$ wget https://github.com/philippkueng/philippkueng.github.com/blob/source/source/_import/blogml.rb --no-check-certificate

This import script was actually created by @derekmorrison to assist him by Moving to Jekyll. Since URLs have to be rewritten because of the .aspx extensions which are part of BlogEngine I slightly modified the script to additionally create an .htaccess file and to play nice with non-ASCII encoded post-titles.

Next, move the BlogML.xml file inside the source directory and also create two seperate folders called files and images inside source. Then copy the contents of the previously dumped App_Data/files folder to their respective folders (images or files) by keeping the path structure intact. Means, that App_Data/files/2010/2/file.zip will go to octopress/source/files/2010/2/file.zip.

Now to the fun part, open your Terminal and navigate inside your octopress/source directory. Then execute:

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$ ruby -r './_import/blogml.rb' -e 'Jekyll::BlogML.process("BlogML.xml")'

This should have imported all your existing posts so that you can now generate your Jekyll blog from it by exiting the source directory and issuing the rake command.

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$ cd ..
$ bundle exec rake generate

Deploying

There’s already documentation available on how to deploy Octopress to various hosting platforms. Since you’re migrating from BlogEngine I highly recommend running your own VM or getting a shared hosting account with .htaccess support in order to not let your visitors down with feeding them broken links. Actually since Heroku is offering their polyglot Cedar-stack you should be able to run .htaccess on there too. YMMV

If your hosting provider is only offering FTP, then deploy manually by uploading the contents of the public folder and adding the .htaccess file from inside the source folder.

Fixes

We’re not quite done yet. Log into your Google and Bing Webmaster account and replace the sitemap.axd entry with sitemap.xml. The same goes for your Feedburner account, log in and replace feeds.axd with atom.xml.

Finally fix the disqus comments. Log into their dashboard and select the account you want to migrate. Then click on the Tools tab and afterwards the Migrate Threads navigation entry. Hit the Start Crawling button for the Redirect Crawler Migration and your done.