Tag Archives: WML

The Mobile Web Part 6: 7 Useful Mobile Site Resources

Over the past five days we have covered quite a few bases in the mobile website area. In case you missed them, you can find the posts here:

I think it’s about time to bring this series to a close, with today’s post “7 Useful Mobile Site Resources.” I have to admit, the biggest reason I wrote this series was because I recently got my hands on an iPod Touch, after far too much waiting. I’ve been thinking about the topic for a long time, well before I got the i’Touch, since before I was seriously considering buying one (since the first generation Touch came out).

Now, where should you go from here? Following are a few resources that you may find useful.

1. Mobile Web Development by Nirav Mehta

Mobile Web Development is focused on non-iPhone mobile sites (I’m not sure if it even mentions the iPhone). It’s fairly current, having been published in 2008, and covers a broad array of topics in it’s 216 pages. It covers WML and WAP, XHTML MP, sending text messages (SMS) via server-side script, PayPal Mobile, Interactive Voice, and a few other things.

I haven’t tried out any of the examples or anything, but I read through the book, and it seems to be good overall. It’s an easy read, and shouldn’t take much time to get through.

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The Mobile Web Part 2: Mobilize Your Site the Easy Way

There are many ways to create a mobile version of your website. You can do it manually, use a WordPress plugin, or let MoFuse do it for you. Today I will cover the easy option, MoFuse, and follow-up this post with the more advanced option tomorrow.

MoFuse allows you to “Mobilize your blog” in about ten minutes. You simply create a free account, supply your blog’s URL, and pick a URL for your resulting mobile site. The URL will look something like you.mofuse.mobi, though you can map it to your own subdomain if you wish (m.yourdomain.com is a common convention).

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The Mobile Web Part 1: Why Go Mobile?

The mobile web is growing fast. More and more people are browsing the web on the go, besides at home on their computer. Now is a good time to put together a mobile version of your site, so you don’t miss out on the extra eyes that could potentially read your site.

Today, the mobile web is split between two groups: iPhone/iPod Touch users and everybody else.

Plenty of people have phones now that can browse stripped-down WML pages, which is painful at best, impossible at worst. Then Apple came out with the iPhone and iPod Touch, finally creating a mobile device that’s actually bearable to surf the web with. (I recently bought an iPod Touch, and I have to say it’s awesome.)

iPhone and iPod Touch

As great as the iPhone/i’Touch is, it’s not perfect. It’s still much easier to navigate an iPhone-specific page than a normal page. I can read pretty much any page on the web with ease on my iPod Touch. Here I am reading a page on Pro Blog Design with the device:

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