As a follow-up to my post about the iSite’s iPhone and Android app-building service, I wanted to cover an alternative way to bring your WordPress-based site to mobile devices. WordPress Mobile Edition by Crowd Favorite is very quick and easy way to create a very stripped-down, simplified version of your site for mobile devices.
This plugin is actually a plugin/theme combo pack, which adds a few steps to the plugin installation processs. After you download and unzip the files using the link above, you’ll find both the plugin file, wp-mobile.php, and a folder called “carrington-mobile-1.0.2.” Place the plugin file in the wp-content/plugins directory and the Carrington theme in the wp-content/theme directory. After you activate the plugin, visitors using mobile devices will be redirect to the new minimalist, gray theme.
The plugin’s settings page, which can be found other the Settings menu in the backend of WordPress, allows you to edit lists of mobile and touch device browsers that will be redirected to the mobile theme. I’ve removed the iPhone and Android from our list as I find the full site more usable and better-looking on my iPhone than the alternative theme. You should consider doing similar testing with your site and soliciting customer feedback to determine what platforms really need a specialized mobile theme and which should continue to see your standard design.
Speaking of feedback, if you’re using a mobile device to access ReadyMadeWeb, please leave a comment below and let us know how the site looks and performs on your device.
Overall, this plugin is great—it provides a very easy-to-navigate alternative to a standard theme. But, it would be nice to have some basic customization of the theme—like choosing a new color palette—built into the plugin’s settings menu. Additionally, building-in or at least linking to a mobile phone emulation/testing website would be helpful. That said, none of this takles away from the fact that this plugin is a great alternative to creating multiple website-as-app solutions for individual platforms like the iPhone or Android.
For more on mobile plugins for WordPress, check out the list of top WordPress mobile plugins at WordPress feed.
iPhone and Android apps are no longer the domain of developers now that tools like iSites.us by GenWi. This tool makes creating a mobile app version of your website as easy as clicking through a series of menus and forking over a modest $25.
Because I can’t resist fiddling around with easy-to-use webware, I’ve begun the process of creating an iPhone version of ReadyMadeWeb in order to review iSites’s service and to give everyone another way to see what we’re up to.
The process of building out the applications was relatively simple as this app has only a few, basic options. The first step in the process is identifying your RSS feeds and your accounts at (micro)blogging, photo sharing, and video sites. Currently iSites supports Twitter, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous on the blogging side of things; YouTube and Qik for video; and Flickr, Webshots, Smugmug, and Zooomr for photos. But, this “support” is really just a quick way of grabbing RSS feeds—in fact, there is no verification of ownership of any of these accounts—so the RSS feature really covers your bases.
I was impressed that the RSS function was able to grab the thumbnail images from the feed and turn them into great-looking icons for each post. This made the preview of the finished product look very professional—a lot like the New York Times mobile reader.
From the feeds screen you move on to the design and creative phases of the process. Have your site’s color palette handy for this as you’ll need to plug in some hexadecimal color values. You’ll also need a capable designer ready to crop, stretch and resize your logo into the rigidly defined dimensions required by the iPhone and the iTunes store.
Be sure to play close attention to the Menu section under the Design tab as your menu order will match the order in which you add your feeds to the menu. Hopefully GenWi updates this feature to allow users to drag and drop menu items around as I found myself having to delete items and re-enter them after seeing that the order couldn’t be changed post-entry.
Unfortunately, our app won’t be coming out very soon due to the incredible demand for these iSites-powered apps. A message at the publication screen as well as the front page of their site reads:
Currently we have been inundated with new app requests. Hence we have decided to temporarily stop activating and accepting payments for new apps until all currently paid apps are submitted to Apple for final review. Please note that you can continue to create new apps and publish – but will not be able to activate and submit it for review.
It’s not clear how long this embargo on new apps publication will last, which also makes the pricing scheme a bit murky. Because the publishing option is shutdown, I remain unclear if the $25 price tag will nab you an iPhone app or an Android app or if you get both as a package deal. Ben Parr of Mashable says that the Android apps won’t be available for publication until February, adding to the confusion.
Once the publication embargo is lifted and our app has made its way to the iTunes Stores, I’ll update this review. Until then I’ll just say so far, so good.
To barrow a line from Mark Twain, the reports of RSS’s death have been greatly exaggertated. Okay, so RSS readers aren’t used by a lot of people, but they really should be.
Products like Google Reader allow you to keep everything you love online organized, categorized and quickly viewable in one place. Google Reader specifically allows you to take your reading with you and share it with others.
Google Reader can also make your web-reading work flow a lot more organized and streamlined. If you’re regularly blogging about topics in the news, Reader will allow you peruse headlines, highlight the items you want to look into further using the “star” feature, and thereby quickly create a reading list for your daily blogging.
This isn’t just limited to your PC or Mac, you can take reader with you and use it fill many of the otherwise unproductive parts of your day. My favorite mobile reader app is Byline for the iPhone, a great interface that allow for quick reading, starring, sharing, and has nice little features like “Mail Link to this Page” which makes for quick sharing with non-users of Google Reader.
If you’re using an Android-based phone, Google Reader is, of course, supported and several alternative interfaces to Google’s own can be found in the app store. If you’re using a BlackBerry or another mobile device, you can check out google.com/mobile/more to see what applications are available for your phone.
For people working in groups, Google Reader can be an incredible resource. The sharing feature allows group blogs and other writers working in teams to quickly move good stories in front of other writes on their team. Just be sure to be following the shared items of the other writes in your group and you’ll make the discovery process for good fodder for stories take much less time.
Whether you’re a blogger or just a regular reader of more than one blog, by investing the short amount of time to setup and get into the rhythm of using Google Reader, you’ll save time and give yourself a bunch of tools to do more with what you’re reading.
Check out this video by the folks behind Google Reader to get familiar with the basics:
Warning: this post is for uber geeks who are comfortable with SSH, Linux command line operations, and showing off their server uptime stats to strangers.
Default monitoring tools from many hosting services leave a lot to be desired. You have to log in to the server to use them, they’re often several clicks deep into your control panel, they rarely display everything you want to see, and most importantly, they’re not on your iPhone.
Thankfully, iStat, an iPhone app by Bjango, solves this problem. Installing the iPhone App is easy, but it will set you back a whopping $0.99. Getting your server to talk to the App is just a bit trickier. It took me an hour or so to do it the first time, but using these instructions, it should only take you 10 minutes.
To get started, log in to your server using an SSH client like Putty if you’re using a PC, or terminal on a Mac. Once you’ve logged in, use “cd/” to drop down the root directory, and then using the following commands to create a directory for iState and then download, configure, and install the program:
mkdir istat
cd istat
wget http://istatd.googlecode.com/files/istatd-0.5.4.tar.gz
tar -zxvf istatd-0.5.4.tar.gz
cd istatd-0.5.4
./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc
make
make install
Create a new user account for the program so it can run in a shielded environment:
Create a script to restart service upon reboot using vi:
vi /etc/init.d/istatreboot.sh
Then, and add the following lines:
# Start istatd upon reboot/startup
/usr/bin/istatd -d
Make sure to set this file to the right permissions to allow it to run:
chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/istatreboot.sh
Edit the /etc/rc.local file:
vi /etc/rc.local
Now add “/etc/init.d/istatreboot.sh” to the bottom of the script
Next, you’ll want to edit /etc/istat.conf
vi /etc/istat.conf
In this file you’ll want to edit the server_code value to a five digit code you will later enter on your iPhone. This serves as a password for access to iStat.
Next, you’ll want to change the values of monitor_net and monitor_disk to this:
monitor_net ( venet0 )
monitor_disk ( /dev/vzfs )
You’re done! Reboot the server to make sure your service will startup upon restart and configure the app on your phone.
Note: These instructions are based on a Media Temple dedicated virtual server running CentOS. Your server’s configuration may vary, so you may need to adapt these instruction to your specific configuration. Check out the iStat user Google group.
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