We’ve gone mobile!

Thanks to the WPtouch plugin, there’s now a mobile version of this site designed to play nicely on mobile touch devices (ie. iPhone, iPod touch, Android, etc.). Ya know, cause so many people can’t wait to hear what I have to say.

Sarcasm aside- it’s quite awesome, and I’ve also implemented it on the Solas site (which people actually visit).  They also claim it can load a page on mobile browsers up to 30 seconds faster on and Edge connection.  Not bad.

Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

WPtouch has a couple of cool features, the first of which is direct messaging from the mobile site to the administrator’s iPhone (via push notifications) with Prowl/Growl.  Do I actually want to use this feature?  I don’t think so, but it’s an interesting option.  Probably the biggest thing stopping me is the $2.99 price tag on the Prowl iPhone app.  For the amount of times it would be useful (offhand, I’m thinking zero), it’s not really worth three bucks.

It also sports built-in integration with the WordTwit plugin, which allows you to show off your latest tweets and automatically send a tweet when you publish a new blog post.  Interestingly, there’s also support for GigPress, but I’ve decided to stick with Gigs Calendar on the Solas site for the moment, as it seems to have a nicer layout.

Speaking of mobile: this post was typed up on the WordPress iPhone app.  Unfortunately, support for hyperlinks is basically non-existent, so I still had to save as a draft and add the links on my laptop.  I hope they can figure out a way to make it easier, but I’m afraid the iPhone just isn’t built for such things.