The Mobile Web Part 2: Mobilize Your Site the Easy Way
Thursday, September 25th, 2008 by Matt
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).
You can upload a logo, customize the color scheme, and control what goes into your mobile site. You start out with a homepage consisting of just your ten most recent posts, though you can add in more RSS feeds, static pages, and links to other sites.
MoFuse generates both an iPhone/iPod Touch version and a WML version, and sends visitors to the correct one when they access the site. Users of computers will see previews of what it will look like on their mobile device. Take a look for yourself with source.mofuse.mobi.
You can place a link to your MoFuse page on your site, or you can use a bit of PHP code they provide to automatically detect mobile users visiting your site and send them to MoFuse.
Mofuse is a great option for anyone looking to easily put together a mobile version of their blog (or any RSS-equipped website).
Come back tomorrow for the next post in The Mobile Web.
5:55 am on September 26th, 2008
[...] part two of the “The Mobile Web” series, I covered MoFuse, a service that automatically [...]
7:32 am on September 26th, 2008
That’s a pretty cool service! I saw the link in your footer a few days ago, but I hadn’t tried it out on my iPod yet. It looks great! I love the post thumbnails in particular.The only problem with it to me is that it’s kind of hard to know there is an iPhone version available, unless you already know the site. Might be worth adding a message solely for iPhone users about the iPhone version.
11:46 am on September 26th, 2008
Michael, I’m planning on setting up some sort of browser detection script, so if an iPhone or iPod user comes along it will display a prompt asking whether they want the full version or the mobile-optimized version. I’m not sure what I’d do about users of WML or XHTML MP browsers though… Hopefully they’d just notice the mobile link on their normal browsers, and know to go to source.mofuse.mobi if they decide to visit via phone?
As for the post thumbnails… I wish MoFuse would ignore the smileys in my posts instead of setting them as the thumbnails if there isn’t another image in the post.
7:32 pm on September 26th, 2008
Haha, is that why its using smilies on a lot of them?? I just assumed it was their version of a default image!I love smilies though, so I’m counting that as a feature!
7:56 pm on September 26th, 2008
Their default image is a sort of word-bubble thing. It looks kind of funny with the smilies like that. (Funny in a good way.)