Mobile Web Junkie

Stuck for something to do when out and about? Or maybe you’re desperate for a pizza but don’t know where to get one?

Well all these problems and more have been solved with the latest chunk to be added to Wapple Canvas.

It’s called the Bing Search Near Me chunk and is an integration with a number of technologies from those clever folk at Bing. It allows you to search for locations near to you – pizzas, restaurants, golf clubs, fitness centers – they’re all there ready to be searched for.
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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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Previously on Wapple Canvas powered mobile sites, URLs weren’t the prettiest or most SEO friendly they could be.

Sure, you could insert text at the start of the URL and create a shortcode to identify your site, but essentially, everything was managed and displayed with pretty ugly looking variables.

But that has all changed.

We’ve introduced a new feature into Wapple Canvas called Tidy URLs that allow you to configure, at a page level, the URL that page will have.
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We’ve been busy recently and have added a ton of new features into Wapple Canvas.

Some are updates to existing functionality, some are completely new. All of them are exciting and greatly improve your mobile browsing experience!
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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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We do lots of great stuff with mobile forms in Canvas. You’ve got advanced validation rules, you can add all sorts of different form items and get extensive reports on what has been submitted.

But one thing we were missing was the ability to have a file upload form item so if you wanted your mobile web application to have the ability to upload photos from their phone, you were a bit stuck.

Now however, you have the option of doing exactly this, by adding a form item and setting the item type as “file”.

Of course, the functionality for this feature is available if you’re building your form with WAPL, just use a <formItem> element, and set the “item_type” to “file”.

Most modern handsets support it, with the exception of the iPhone, which doesn’t allow access to the file system from the browser. We’re hoping this will change in the future, but for now Safari will disable the option.

For more info about how to build form items in WAPL, check out http://wapl.info/coding-for-the-mobile-web-with-WAPL/chapter/Form-Items/

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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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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