Archive for 'Tech'

Wednesday, 20th August 2008

making mobile sites

With the growing market in mobile/handheld devises it seems to be getting more important then ever to make your sites mobile friendly.

I first got interested after reading this: http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/2008/06/23/if-the-olympics-are-going-mobile-then-why-not-your-church-website/

As part of the re-vamp of whychristmas?com, I’ve just got a mobile version going using ‘mowser‘. I’d looked at a few options and mowser seems really nice. mowser is a site/browser for ‘handheld’ devices and can turn any existing site into a more handheld/mobile friendly one. (just enter a url and hit go)

So the mobile version of whychristmas?com would be at: http://mowser.com/web/www.whychristmas.com

However, to make it easier for handheld browsers to find it, you can add a simple line in the <head> section like:

And tada, a mobile friendly site!!!

You’ll see that in the line above, the url is to: http://m.whychristmas.com to be posh(!), I’ve set-up a sub domain in cpanel (m) and set it to redirect to the mowser address. Doing that means the ‘mobile version’ link in the footer of the site looks like it’s coming from the main whyc site, so a bit nicer…

And if you use wordpress, there’s this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mowser-wordpress-mobile/ which does all the work for you!

I’ve used the wp plugin on the whychristmas blog and my church site (as it’s run in wp…) and of course this blog!!! and I think it will be one of the ‘must install’ plugins on a wp site.

With the boom in handhelds/smartphones, etc. this seems to be a really quick (and easy) way of making sure sites are good on them as well!

by james in Tech, Work, html & css | No Comments »

Tuesday, 22nd April 2008

Oh Preview!

Having recently made the jump from PC to Mac, the one program I really missed was Picasa (I have parallels and can run it from there - but it takes a while…).

I’m sure many know the fab new ‘basic’ image tools in 10.5 preview - but I’ve just found them and, well cool! Basic resize, crop and colour adjustments all within preview, a great little time saver.

More at:
http://www.macworld.com/article/132468/2008/04/workingmac2504.html
http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/13-things-you-didnt-know-about-preview.html

by james in Any Other Business, Tech | No Comments »

Friday, 14th September 2007

wordpress stats pt2

In a previous post, I talked about quick stats. My new wordpress stat plugin of choice is Counterize II.

It gives good simple bar graphs and you can control who much of what is shown on the page! It also pops a nice little ‘hits’ box on the dashboard.

by james in Tech, Work | No Comments »

Friday, 14th September 2007

songbird, from the guys behind winamp …

… with some good stuff by mozilla/vlc/lots of other clever people!

I was installing this: http://userstyles.org/styles/2318 in FF this morning (and wow it’s nice, makes google reader even better and saw in the list of supported programs ‘songbird‘. Not heard of that I thought. A new things from mozilla?! So after a google I found: http://songbirdnest.com/ and even though it’s still in developer build, it looks very impressive.

Imported my itunes library (except things from the itunes store) great, found all the vids on my system (in all formats but doesn’t seem to like flv at the mo) and plays things very nicely. And it’s SO FAST! There’s no lag at all when clicking to play videos or music.

And having surfing as built in (but using a decent browser) is also great. Think of it like having firefox, itunes and divx in one program! I’ve not tried the ipod support yet…

Once this gets into a fully working program, I think it’s gonna turn a lot of heads!

by james in Any Other Business, Tech | No Comments »