Nerve Endings Firing Away

Owning an iPod Touch makes me use my laptop a little less. How? No more rushing back to my laptop during a commercial break or ‘offline time’ (read passive relaxation) to check my e-mail, Twitter updates or to Google something that I just read or saw on television. The Touch does that job of checking on updates much easier without distraction that ends up with me spending far too much time on my laptop than I would like. The Touch comes with an e-mail client to which you can add your e-mail accounts, an inbuilt browser (Safari) that let you browse websites, and of course apps like Twitterific, Wikipanion, and SportsTap that lets you do those quick checking tasks. I was always skeptical of how much you can read or see on a small screen but the amazing clarity and quality on the Touch screen has to be seen to be believed.

Of course there are times when I like to browse news sites or blogs from my couch without making the seven-yard trip to my laptop. If you’ve tried reading from websites or blogs on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you know how much of a pain it can be to zoom in and out and scroll all over to read a story. I would much rather prefer if every site offered a version for mobile gadgets that makes such reading easier. The New York Times has an useful app that lets me read the news from their front page, business section, and op-ed pages in an iPhone friendly format. Some blogs like Talking Points Memo also have customized their themes so that if you access them from an iPhone, you are instantly directed to an iPhone friendly interface with larger fonts and fit-to-screen margins that let you do all the reading by just scrolling up and down.

I’m surprised that not many blogs even the popular ones haven’t yet enabled this option. I looked around for a simple fix to make my blog iPhone friendly and found this cool plugin – WPTouch. As with any plugin, you don’t have to dabble in any PHP code or mess with your template; you just install and activate it. The plugin detects if the user agent is an iPhone or an iPod Touch and instantly reverts to a bare bones yet aesthetic version of your content. The metadata like the date, author, categories, and tags are prominently displayed on the front page with the title in large bold font and number of comments up in a large red dot. Clicking on the title takes you to the individual page which is also stripped down but the content is easy to read and fits nicely on the screen; no ads or any sidebar widgets or badges. If you still want to see the original site, there is an option to revert back. The only downside is if you are using WP-Cache but it is easily fixed by adding ‘iphone’ and ‘ipod’ to the rejected User Agents strings in the settings for the Cache plugin and deleting your cache. Your iPhone or iPod Touch visitors will get your un-cached site.

Admittedly the users accessing your blog using these devices may not be high but trust me, my respect for blogs goes up when they make it easier to read them on the Touch. And the number of iPhone and Touch users is only going to rise. So make your blog iPhone-friendly today. Drop in a quick hi if you are reading this from your mobile device :)