Compel iPhone and mobile viewers to adore you - easily enhance your blog for them!

Mar 4, 2008

Compel iPhone and mobile viewers to adore you - easily enhance your blog for them!

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STOP THE PRESSES!!

Whew! Thank you. Now, what was I saying? Ah yes!

"Are you aware quite how important making your site friendly to iPhone visitors wil be???"

WELL? Are you?? Huh? Huh?

Think about it. More and more people are indulging in mobile surfing! More and more people are browsing the Internet while on the go…and more and more people are getting a first impression of sites while sitting on trains, idly surfing about online, using the free time miraculuously available to them, seeing what’s new…..

(insert random bits of silence)

<shake><shake> Ooops! I was contemplating that mystical beast, "free time." Sorry, just drifted off there while thinking about actually having time to slow down and…

ARGH! Sorry again, I’m back. :) Anywhos, people are surfing via mobile browsers and I’ll bet, the concept of actually (gasp!) redesigning your blog layout for these folk is making you grin with glee, leap with happy excitement and quickly IM your friends with how your non-existent time just imploded, right?

But fear not, gentle reader! For smart people like you and me don’t rip apart our current themes for solely one audience; instead we add Wordpress plugins that automatically detect if a person is accessing our site via a mobile phone, activate said plugin, and go along our merry way without having to change a single pixel of our site design.

Wouldn’t you agree? ‘Course you would!

And here’s how you do it.

DO THIS FIRST) Send thanks to the Gods and Goddesses of the Internet that make the creed, "develop and share for free", possible.

When you really think on it, it’s truly amazing that in today’s day and age, you can get so much for free online.

Step 1.) Visit Content Robot’s IWPhone

Talk about an easy step.

Step 2.) Download iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme Version 0.1.2

Want the direct link? It’s Download the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme zip file for iPhone Web Site development.

Step 3.) Unzip the package and follow the instructions for uploading.

Contrary to other plugins packages, this one will give you:

Plugin file ( iwphone.php - that will go in your plugins directory)

and

iPhone theme (iwphone-by-contentrobot - goes into your themes directory).

Here’s the instructions:

Extract the “iwphone-wordpress-plugin-and-theme” folder.
Locate the file “iwphone.php” inside the “iwphone-wordpress-plugin-and-theme” folder and upload it into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Locate and upload the entire folder named “iwphone-by-contentrobot” into your wp-content/themes/ directory.
Go to your WordPress administration area and click on Plugins and activate the plugin called “iWPhone”. Do NOT make the iWPhone-by-ContentRobot theme the current theme under Presentation.
Launch Safari on an iPhone or iPod touch and enter your blog’s URL, and you should now see your content in the iPhone/iPod touch-optimized theme.

Iphone your site! I just finished doing this with my AskOwlbert site, and asked for someone to view it on their iPhone, take a picture and send me the resulting image. After cleaning it up in photoshop and putting it on a nice display, what I got…is to your right.

Nice, eh?

NO SITE CHANGES! No coding, no nothing - I just had to activate the upload the plugin, upload the theme, and voila, instant iPhone access.

Now if that ain’t Macgyvering, I don’t know what is.

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

(By the way, if you have any questions about the topics in this posting "Compel iPhone and mobile viewers to adore you - easily enhance your blog for them!", do comment below - I'll try to clarify any issues).

Barbara Ling and Owlbert

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