Sunday, April 04, 2010

An experiment

Update 2010-04-05: After some consideration and experimentation, it looks like I'll end up migrating to Wordpress. It seems to have more and better features built in. I'll keep posting here for a little while, till I get things set up at the new site and can notify anyone who has me blogrolled that I know about (which may even be before my next real post).

Status Update
: Redirect temporarily disabled while I work on things.

I've been looking for a while now for a way to make my blog more mobile-friendly. I've noticed that, while the layout I'm using works fairly well with my Palm Pre, it's not really optimal. Then one day I went to Gun Nuts Media on my phone and saw they have a mobile version that comes up automatically on my phone and realized that was what I was looking for. Alas, it turns out that Gun Nuts Media is on WordPress, and Blogger doesn't have that option. It seemed I was out of luck.

Looking into it again, in the vain hope that Blogger had joined the 21st century, I found a link to Flurp. Flurp converts a blog to a mobile friendly format (with a couple of different layouts for different phones). You can either insert code in the blog header that redirects mobile browsers to the mobile site automatically, or you can add a link to the mobile version. It's still in alpha, but it seems to work pretty well (though it does cut titles short after only about 15 characters on the iPhone version).

Right now, I've set it up to automatically redirect. I may change that in the future, depending on how it affects my usage and depending on any feedback I get from you, my readers.

2 comments:

Caleb said...

Honestly, I'd just switch to Wordpress. They're a great service and their customer support is fantastic. I have no complaints.

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

I had hesitated because I didn't want to deal with migrating (and making people update their blogrolls), but after looking at Wordpress again, I think that's what I'll end up doing. It's a lot more feature-friendly and open, and seems more capable.