I’m pleased to announce the launch of mobile.jasonclarke.org, the mobile-friendly edition of this very website.
The mobile market has taken some pretty signifigant leaps over the past year and I think it will break out in an even bigger way in 2007. That’s why I’m getting the jump today in experimenting with the process, benefits, and challenges associated with launching a mobile version of a website.
mobile.jasonclarke.org is a stripped-down, graphics-free, text only version of this site, with full posts and should read well on a mobile device such as a Blackberry, handset, smartphone, or etc. The site is essentially a web-based RSS feed, except much of the same metadata (about, copyright, search) present on the full version of jasonclarke.org.
To render the mobile edition, I’m taking a slightly non-optimal approach. That’s to say, rather than utilizing the existing content manager for this site (WordPress) and figuring a way to grab its data and display it on my mobile domain sans styles, instead I’ve opted to use a third-party service to grab my RSS feed, convert it to HTML format, and re-display back on the mobile site.
This approach presents two major drawbacks: One, the third-party service (the highly-recommened FeedDigest) I’m using does not update the mobile site instantly- there will be a lag time of anywhere from 15 minutes or more between when I publish a post and when it hits the mobile version. Secondly, because I’m not using my native content manager to display data on the mobile site, I can’t bring in helpful tools such as my archives and/or categories.
Obviously, my next step will be to overcome these disadvantages by integrating my content manager more fully with the mobile edition of my site. But for now, I’m pleased to be able to offer my urban-dwelling friends a chance to take this site with them wherever they go.
UPDATE: The mobile site has now moved to http://jasonclarke.org/m
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