Weblogs, Inc/Blogsmith Goes Mobile But May Cause Headaches
September 28th, 2006
Our CEO at NewsGator, JB, sent me a link to a post on Jason Calacanis’s blog about his dev team and their efforts to properly render versions of the Weblogs Inc. sites for mobile devices. This is very cool - I just took a look at Engadget on my Windows Mobile device and it looks great.  I subscribe to Jason’s blog so would probably have gotten to this post eventually, but it is pretty amazing to have a CEO who is so in touch with & on top of what is going on in the RSS/mobile space… that is very cool as well.
Anyway, like I said, this achievement is great for the mobile space but creates an interesting dilemma for mobile clients that are already trying to solve the same problem. Let me elaborate… in NewsGator Go! I use Skweezer’s (or Google’s) transcoding proxy to format web pages for mobile friendly viewing (Bloglines does this as well). So if you are consuming RSS feeds in NewsGator Go! and want to spawn a browser to dig into an article, the page is formatted for mobile and for the 90+% of sites that aren’t mobile friendly this is a great thing. For the small percentage of sites that do render properly on mobile, the transcoding foobars all the work they have done (the default page is run through the transcoder and all the publisher’s mobile goodness is lost). Arne and the good folks at the::unwired have noted this as well.
This is an interesting problem that needs a creative solution. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Entry Filed under: Mobile
September 28th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
[…] I previously posted about the news from Jason Calacanis about Weblogs Inc. making their sites render nicely on mobile devices and how this is very cool but presents a challenge for mobile clients… you can read more here and at the::unwired. […]
October 1st, 2006 at 5:56 pm
In terms of Arne and other’s who have made “mobile” versions of their sites… it’s probably worth questioning: “To what extent?”
Our CTO, Barnabas Kendall, makes an excellent point about how publishers end up foobaring themselves. The “simple” task of transcoding is far more complex than people realize:
http://barnabas.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/bloglines-skweezer/
October 1st, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Thanks for the comment and pointer to Barnabas’s post. the art of transcoding a page is clearly not trivial and the 80/20 rule is displayed in all its beauty when it comes to transcoding web pages for mobile device.
As a mobile developer, the complexity of this task is very clear to me and Barnabus explains this well in his post.
Thanks Kevin