Mobile Web Junkie

Last week I did a podcast with Brian Prows from MobileBeyond. We went through quite a bit – from how you can mobilize your WordPress blog with our mobile plugin to how in a future release of the plugin you’ll be able to place Mobile Adverts on your blog and make a bit of money out of it.

You can listen to the whole thing on Brian’s website at http://mobilebeyond.net/mobilizing-and-making-money-with-a-wordpress-blog-or-mobile-website/ or have a search on iTunes for MobileBeyond.

Lastly, I must say a big thank you to Brian for first of all giving me the opportunity to do the podcast, and secondly for doing such an awesome job of editing it together!

Let us know what you thought of the podcast – and if you’d like to hear more, tell us what subjects you’d like us to cover!

Just before Christmas, we mobilized HowToMakeMyBlog.com by installing and configuring the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress.

I’ve written a much more in-depth article over there about how we did it, but here’s a bite-sized version that you can cut out and put in your wallet:
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Two weeks ago Automattic released a new version of WordPress (2.9). As it’s Christmas, we thought we’d enter into the spirit of things and release an updated version of the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress as a present.

We’ve listened to all of your feedback, ideas and suggestions – and as we’ve now got a fancy issue tracking system, we’ve been able to prioritise all of them and create a development roadmap. However, saying that, it became pretty obvious what the focus of this release was going to be – mobile themes.
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Last month we published a new mobile plugin to the wordpress.org plugin repository called WordPress Mobile Admin. It won’t surprise you to hear that it does exactly what it says on the tin and mobilizes your WordPress control panel.
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WordPress Mobile Admin is a fully featured WordPress control panel for your mobile. It works on every device – no matter what it’s capabilities, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an iPhone or BlackBerry, you can still manage and update your blog whilst you’re on the go.

It uses Wapple’s advanced web services to produce perfect markup whilst at the same time maintaining the familiar look and feel of WordPress. You can write and edit posts, moderate and reply to comments as well as updating and managing tags, categories and pages.
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Full admin controls and blogging from my mobile phone. Pre launch test! Retains wordpress styling. You’re a super genius Rich Gubby!

What’s this!? Blogging from my mobile? Testing a new service for wordpress, designed by Rich Gubby using Wapple Architect… All to be revealed soon!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been releasing updates to my wordpress plugin. A bug fix here, a new option there. You’ve got configurable menus, support for Cyrillic character sets and much, much more.

But the backlog of new features has been growing and it needed a big update to clear the decks! So yesterday signalled the release of the latest incarnation of my Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress – version 1.5!

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Content Management Systems – it seems as though they are the in-vogue tool at the moment with every man and his dog developing one or using it to power their website.

If you do a search in a well known popular search engine for “CMS” (and assuming you aren’t searching for the Church Mission Society), you’ll find Joomla at #3. With 139 million returned results that’s not bad by anyone’s standards.

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Overcoming the barriers of mobile web design and development – it’s the tagline of our blog and something that we strive towards each and every day.

We’ve given the development community some amazing tools that allow you to create some fantastic mobile sites and we’ve created plugins, components and classes that help you at every step.

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I am pleased to say that since my recent rant, the BBC have started to render correctly for my Android handset. I have the mobile version again. I am happy.

It’s movie time here at Wapple HQ! We’ve been busy conjuring up some neat, little bite-sized chunks of Wapple goodness on our new YouTube channel. We thought this would be a useful and illustrative way of demonstrating how easy it is to develop mobile websites using Wapple Architect & Canvas™.

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After a number of releases of the mobile plugin for WordPress, you’d think I’d want to put my feet up for a bit and have a well deserved rest and a cup of tea. But not a bit of it! I’ve been burning the midnight oil to get version 1.4 ready for release so that you have even more control and even more ways to mobilize your blog.
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Transcoding web pages into mobile web pages does not work.

There’s an ongoing debate on the subject of mobile web transcoding, so here’s our take.

Let’s be clear on our language here though. Transcoding videos for mobiles is essential and very good, but doing it to your web output is bad. Really bad.

A reliance on an automated process that takes HTML output and reformats it to mobile markup is a deluded one. Computers are really bad at recognising diverse visual patterns (that’s why we all use CAPTCHA to protect from bots) and you don’t get much more diverse than web design. If a transcoder has been taught your web layout, you’ll find yourself tied to that web design or face losing any learning invested in the system.

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Right now, I feel like the blind man telling my own future.

If the BBC don’t start recognising my Android handset as a mobile browser again, I’ll go elsewhere. I’ve had enough of navigating their full website through my small screen and I want the mobile experience back.

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