Chris Norton goes mobile

Yes, I am finally getting with the 21st century and going mobile. Or my blog is at least. In the sense that it works a lot better on mobile devices now.

I installed MobilePress and it appears to working very well. My impetus was that I was sick of trying to access my blog on my Nokia E71 which, although it has a fairly full-featured browser, is still a small screen making it an utter pain to scroll around. Not to mention the pointless download of many superfluous kilobytes of data. So hopefully, if you happen to be looking at this on a mobile browser, it will be that much easier to read.

While I was at it I also had a go at WPhone and Wordmobi. WPhone is similar to MobilePress in that it presents a different interface for mobile browsers but, in the case, does it for the WordPress administration area. I haven't used it too much so far but it seems functional enough. Wordmobi is functionality the same as WPhone but is an S60 (Symbian) application so I don't even have to worry about downloading unnecessary data or how the interface is rendered – only the data I need is retrieved and sent. Interestingly it runs on Python, which I didn't even know was available for Symbian. That in itself may require further investigation in future as it could seriously lower the barrier to entry for programming mobile applications.

One final thing to note is that I installed the two extensions via the WordPress plugin system available through the admin panel. It was stupidly simple and meant I didn't have to mess around with FTP clients and the like. I'd say it was a very positive experience and practically worth an upgrade to 2.7 in itself! I'm hoping that having better mobile access to my blog will help me carry through on my new year's resolution to post more frequently.