Oh, to PDA, Now That Spring is Here

Well, I finally got my Treo 650 working. There are a few odd issues with it, (And we’ll discuss those later) …but for the most part the thing is wonderful, particularly given the $50 I paid for it.

I’ve gotten the unlimited bandwith deal, since I consume bandwidth in staggering amounts even while mobile.

One of the reasons I got the thing was that feedback mail was sitting in my in box for hours at a time, without my knowing about it. Now, I can get my mail anytime, anywhere. I’d got the Palm tapping my email servers here, directly.

Nice to be able to keep track of everything while out and about. I’m working now on getting a posting channel available from the Palm, as well.

One issue that popped up with it was one of size and screen styling on the site. The theme I have running here at Bitsblog, I’m still very happy with, but it doesn’t work well with phones or PDA’s. Or, Iphones, either. Then again, looking around at Blogdom, not many others do, either.

So, I’ve added some programming to the site which should make life easier for mobile users. It’s WP-PDA. When you access this site from a Iphone or a PDA, it should now look like this pic to the right, pretty much. (Yes, the pic was stolen from the plug-in support site… easier for me than making my own to do the same thing, and besides, he’s not going to complain; I’m running a free ad for his product, that thousands of people will see!)

On the home page, the plugin runs through the ‘short post’ routines that you’d see active in the RSS feed, and so won’t show any pictures. Until, that is, you actually dive into an individual post.  The idea being to save on bandwith which is so important to folks who have a maximum bandwidth per month allowance

Mind, it does all this on the fly. This site now looks at the kind of browser you’re bringing the site up in, and adjusts to the proper CSS according to how I’ve got the client list laid out.  You need do nothing to get it working. As you can tell, I’m (very!) pleased with how it works.

So pleased in fact I’m going to do something I very rarely do… I’m going to make a reccomendation to fellow bloggers: If you’re running a WordPress site, you’ll want to check out this plugin. It makes all the difference to mobile users. Given the number of mobile users is increasing all the time, I’m looking at this as the future of webbing of all kinds, including Blogging.