Mobilize Your Wordpress Blog

Welcome to Mobilizing Your Blog, Part 2, with a focus on Wordpress (read Part 1 here).

The quickest way to mobilize your Wordpress blog is to install a plugin called Wordpress Mobile Edition. The advantage of using this plugin is that it's quick and easy to setup and it handles a lot of mobile browsers, as well as touch browsers (for Smart Phones).

However, it does have 2 substantial shortcomings:

• It doesn't scale the images to your phone's screen size (the images are usually too big to fit).
• It's hard to customize.

If your blog has a certain style that you want to maintain, it would be ideal if the mobilized version of your blog reflects your brand. WPTouch, a free plugin, can help because it scales images correctly and you can customize it. For example, I installed Version 1.9.13, manually edited the CSS and this is what I came up with.

My Online History in Thumbnails

Anna's interview question about how I got into blogging made me think about my pre-blogging days and my archives indicate a quiet online existence marked by brief spurts of activity.

(+) katzeye's rollover nav bar, click here to demo

My first website was called Katzeye. I bought the domain in 1997 and for years there was literally nothing on it -- not even "hello world". In the late 1990's my web hosting company misdirected katzeye.com to an herbal website. And after that was resolved in 2001, I decided to put up graphic place-holders (some navel-gazing) until 2002. As you can see from the thumbnails below (click to enlarge), Katzeye was rudimentary for a long time, but I never gave up on it. I was determined to become a Webmaster.

In 2003, inspired by Lynda Weinman, Bruce Heavin, Amy Franceschini, and Angela Martini, I turned Katzeye into a full-fledged website. It was a labor of love -- I created each image and wrote every line of HTML and CSS by hand. Sadly, I wasn't aware of content management systems and my handiwork was tedious and didn't scale well. Abandonment was inevitable.

In 2005, I turned Katzeye into an ecard site. I learned a little PHP and a little MySQL and the result was a dynamic website. The photos were terrible, but I was proud of them at the time. You can still check it out if you like -- it still works.

In 2007, I dove into the world of Web 2.0 and created a *photoblog* called Puglyfeet. Though it's currently on hiatus, Puglyfeet still receives emails from visitors from time to time. I learned an enormous amount about blogging while working on Puglyfeet. My photos weren't good at all and working on that site inspired me to learn more about taking better pictures -- or snapshots, as I like to call mine.

I have numerous domain names that haven't seen the light of day. Puglypixel (a puglyfeet spin-off) was parked for years before I felt inspired to work on in it November of last year and thanks to Wordpress, it's a cinch to administer.

That's my online history in thumbnails for those who are curious. And now I leave you with these 6 corny Flash *movies* that I made while taking an online class at the HTML Writer's Guild in 2000 (click to thumbnails to view).

Alright you guys, I hope you're enjoying your Wednesday. I'll be back later this with Small Dreams and the 2nd installment of Mobilizing Your Blog, with the focus on Wordpress. :)

Mobilize Your Blogger Blog

If you've ever looked at your blog from your phone, you know that it can take ages to load. After the HTML, CSS, javascript, images and all the other widgets load, everything looks small and unreadable. The layout you so carefully planned for your desktop or laptop computer doesn't translate so well when viewed on a small telephone screen, even if it's on a Smart Phone (ie. iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc.).



I never realized the importance of website mobility until I got my iPhone. When I'm out and about, on a bus or on CalTrain, I'm busy taking snapshots with Hipstamatic, checking my email, or surfing the web. When I read blogs on my iPhone, it's a challenge because most blogs are not mobilized.