Mobile Web Junkie

Ever since we first created Wapple Architect, you could use it to integrate with Wapple Canvas features. In fact, loading a menu built with Canvas onto an Architect site was one of the first operations we ever performed with our fledging new mobile markup language.

But as we’ve improved the Architect schema, one area of documentation we’ve sadly neglected was telling you how to use these advanced Canvas features in your WAPL.
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Wapple Canvas has just made it easier for you to find things on the mobile internet!

Store locators, POI locators, Location Lookups – call them what you want – we’ve integrated them into Canvas so you can have location based services built into your mobile site.
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Following hot on the heels of our efforts with URLs for Wapple Canvas powered mobile sites, we’ve created another chunk that should help you SEO your sites to the max.

We’ve created a Sitemap chunk, which displays links to all pages on your site, alphabetically, with nice URLs (if you have it turned on).
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If you have a video uploaded to any of the likes of YouTube or Vimeo, we’ve written a new chunk for Wapple Canvas that will allow you to show it to the whole mobile world.

It’s called the Video Link chunk – login in Canvas and add one to a page to see it in action!

If it’s a YouTube video you want to show, a thumbnail is generated automatically, but for other video sharing websites, you can specify the location for an accompanying picture.

If you have an iPhone, videos will display with a play button on, allowing you to play the video with the native controls on the phone. Anything else and you get forwarded to the URL – of course when other handsets add functionality in for video playback, we’ll update the chunk!

If you want to know how to add a Video Link chunk with Architect and WAPL – check out http://wapl.info/coding-for-the-mobile-web-with-WAPL/chapter/Video-Link/ for more info.

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!

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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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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Since its launch in June, the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress has seen a huge amount of usage. So much so that it now deserves a showcase article discussing success stories so far about blogs that have installed the plugin.

Hopefully your site is one of those featured, but if not, don’t despair because I’m going to include a few tips and tricks at the end of this article that will mean that in the next showcase, I can’t fail to include yours!
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