You blog design may be perfectly optimized for the desktop screen but there are lot of people out there who frequently check your website for new content using their mobile phones.
They are not interested in the sidebars, navigation areas and other design elements – all they want to see is a simple listing of your blog posts in reverse chronological order. If they like to read a post, they can click the title and a mobile friendly version of that page should open on the screen of their cell phone.
You may not be a geek or may have the time to create a mobile edition of your blog so here are two simple hacks to help you out – your blog content won’t just look extremely readable on a mobile phone screen, it will also load very fast.
1. Google Reader – The Ten Second Solution
Google Reader can generate an excellent mobile view of your RSS feed without any effort. Just append your feed address to the following URL and your mobile blog is ready.
http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/[feed_address]
And here’s a live example – use your mobile phone to see the awesome page rendering
http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol
Call this link "Mobile Site" and place it somewhere at the top of your blog design so mobile phone users will notice it instantly and switch to the mobile view.
2. The next solution is to create a free account at mofuse.com and they’ll give a personal mobile website with a .mobi address – something like http://labnol.mofuse.mobi/.
If you have self-hosted blog like on WordPress or Blogger Custom domains, you can easily setup the mobile edition of your site on a subdomain (e.g. m.labnol.org) – it is short and your users can easily guess the URL since almost all popular sites now follow the m. convention.
WordPress users are lucky as there’s a plugin that will automatically detect if the client is a mobile phone browser and it then renders a mobile friendly version of the blog to the visitor.
Related: Create Printer Friendly Blog with PDF Support
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/how-to-create-mobile-phone-optimized-blog/2132/
Tags: accessibility, feature, google reader, how to, mobile website, rss, Internet, Web Design
Reader Comments
Thanks! Very useful.
Written by Dima on 01.24.08
awesome hack, thanks!
Written by laura on 01.26.08
Best tip of the Year!!!
It was a real Digital Inspiration for me.
Thanks very much
Daniel Serra
Written by Daniel Serra on 01.27.08
Great idea, thank you! I added the “Mobile” link on my blog and it works perfectly.
The other mobile adaptations I tested wheren’t good, because my blog is picture-based, and the pictures where automatically stretched and degraded to unreadable.
This one instead, just delivers each picture as is, so that, depending on the mobile device, the user might zoom in, zoom out or fit screen at will.
Just what I looked for!
Written by ENTJ on 02.19.08
Hey great tip, but just one question, i have this blog which i booked through Google and presently am using blogger custom domain, Can you tell me since i have no hosting space how can i make my website ready for mobile, i mean using google pages how can i make a site m.finance2money.com , since i am not able to change the address.
Written by Paramjit on 03.01.08
This is such a great idea.. However my blog is so slow and clunky it won’t load at all in a mobile phone, so no one will even see the button I placed.
Wish Blogger would do as WP and automatically make it mobile friendly!
Written by Lady Banana on 03.02.08
Wow, great tips. I’m trying to make a simple mobile page currently. Just for fun. Thanks.
Written by dekan on 03.13.08
Really good article. I have been following your blog for last 3 months. You have good knowledge
on Mobile(cell phone) Industry and happenings. Please continue the good work. Thank you.
Written by Satya on 10.01.08
Nice tip, particularly the tip to have the subdomain redirect. It looks like Mofuse inserts advertisements on the mobile site by itself. It was a bit annoying as the ads are at the very top of the site. Is there any way to turn those off?
Written by DemoGeek on 10.23.08
Really helpful, thanks for it. Will surely try on my website.
Written by Anuj Rathi on 11.12.08
hey I like that idea, the only problem I have is that if I login to my google reader account and click that link to send me to the reader, it want show any posts UNTIL I logout of my account…any ideas?
Written by will on 01.09.09
How do you keep track of mobile visitors if they’re being ported to Google Reader?
Written by David Bradley on 01.16.09
hmmm, test was done on a iPhone so I’m thinking anyone that’s logged in to their google account should not be able to see those posts but if they logout for some reason. Just test your link on a mobile device while been logged in to your google account. Let me know. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Written by will on 01.16.09
When you click on a headline, then read the full story, and go back to the main page, that headline is then gone. Any way to fix that?
Written by robin on 01.16.09
Hey great tip, but just one question, i have this blog which i booked through Google and presently am using blogger custom domain, Can you tell me since i have no hosting space how can i make my website ready for mobile, i mean using google pages how can i make a site m.finance2money.com , since i am not able to change the address.
Written by GSMAIR on 01.20.09
I have a big concern about this. When you click through to “original story” to see a full post, I’m not seeing a referring URL in my stats for the hit.
In other words, and i might be wrong about this, it seems Google is making available you entire post without the blog owner (me) getting any traffic for it.
I have my Feedburner setting set to only show headlines, not full posts.
Written by james on 02.16.09
Yes, I think you’re right James, Google is essentially scraping your content. There are some plugins for Wordpress etc that can create a “mobile” version of your site that you can port to m.sciencebase.com for instance…
Written by David Bradley on 02.17.09
Sigh — I’m on Typepad, which is why I’m looking for another solution.
And if this were happening in the main Google search page, or even in the regular Google RSS Reader, content owners would freak out. I mean, CNN.com and such cannot be OK with this any more than record companies are not okay with people getting their music for free off BitTorrent. I really love Google products and — I hope — this is just an oversight on their part and one that will be corrected.
Written by james on 02.17.09
This is just what the doctor ordered I got my mobile blog up in ten minutes :)
Many many thank you’s
Written by GM From My Cheap Tech on 02.27.09