Saturday, January 23, 2010

Setup A Mobile Version of Your Blog

These days, not all of the visitors on your blog use desktop or laptop to browse the contents. The number of people browsing the internet using their mobile phones is increasing. This maybe due to the new technologies added to the newer mobile phones of today. Also the increasing availability of "hot spots" or wi fi provided in public places like cafe's, bars, restaurant, malls, schools.

This availability is very convenient for internet users as they can surf the internet anywhere wi fi is available with no costs. If unavailable, network providers always offers mobile internet connections at a price.


In time, there will be more people surfing the internet using mobile phones.

Considering this. It might be time for you to set up a mobile version of your blog/site.

Why should I make one?

Simply to make it convenient and easier to navigate for your readers of your blog using mobile phones cause it will load faster.

-Mobile internet browsers, as advance as they are, don't render or display your blog/site as a regular desktop browser would. Sometimes the images won't show up the arrangement of your site's contents are different, disorganized.

The reason for this is that mobile browsers are designed to use very little memory which is your phones memory, often very low. Also mobile browsers are not as equipped in terms of plugins and enhancements as desktop internet browsers are. Although there are newer phones that has desktop like internet browsing capabilities, but most still don't.

Another is that mobile phones don't have very large screens. So trying to fit a website designed for desktop's larger screen resolutions will basically shrink all the elements, contents of that site.

Enough of the convincing already. Let's make your site mobile friendly.

There are 2 ways to make it and both are really easy to do and free. The first one offers more costumization
and also revenue sharing through ads displayed on your mobile sites. the second just modifying your RSS feed url.

MoFuse.com
First, go to http://www.mofusepremium.com/ and sign up for a free account.
Browse to the bottom of the site. Look for MoFuse for blogs and click Mobilize Your Blog to sign up.

NOTE: they only offer free accounts for blogs. you have to sign up for a premium account if you own a website.

Fill up the necessary informations asked. You'll also need to provide your RSS feed eg. http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default , In my case I used http://myplaylist4today.blogspot.com/atom.xml because it's easier to remember.

MoFuse offers more customization of your mobile sites and also revenue sharing with your Adsense or AdMob a mobile advertising platform. So if you already have an account to either on of these integrate it to earn a little extra.

For WordPress blog owners it will be easier to integrate MoFuse with the WordPress Plugin The plugin also detects the browser of your visitors and automatically redirect it to your mobile blog if they are using mobile internet browsers. No modification or template hacking necessary.

For those who own their domain theres an automatic redirect script/code.

Unfortunately, other free blogging platforms don't support redirects such as blogspot.com. The best you can do is either put up a link to your mobile blog or add a small button which you can get from MoFuse.
The best positions would be somewhere at the top. Right below your header, the topmost part of your side bar cause these are the probable positions of the initial screen in mobile browsers.


Here's how my mobile blog looks like

This one showing my header and a banner ad topmost


This showing my post titles


Within posts






Pretty basic display but all the essential stuffs for your readers are there.

Now the other way to make it

Just add a new HTML/Javascript widget to your side bar or other top spots on your blog and put this code


<a href="http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://YOURBLOG.BLOGSPOT.com/feeds/posts/default">SWITCH TO MOBILE VIEW</a>

Just replace YOURBLOG.BLOGSPOT with your blog name. You can also change the SWITCH TO MOBILE VIEW to MY MOBILE SITE or whatever.

The thing I like about this is that it shows a short summary or teasers of your posts below the post title.

Here are some screenshots

The Home Page


Within posts


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