Blog | Mtaram's Daze

Now a days there has been a trend of accessing the web through the phone.

The reasons are:-

Its its easy as all carriers have decent data speeds and in most the browsing is free.

Ease of use as one carries the mobile phone all the time unlike a computer.

So why not convert your blog to a blog that looks great on mobile phones. To view this blog on mobile mode go to http://m.mtaram.com. For this we would be using the built in functionality of the Google Reader to render the feed for the mobile phones.

What you need:-

1. You blog RSS feed URL

2. Access to your Domain control panel if you are hosting your own blog. Or you can register a free domain name of the numerous sited found on Google and redirect it to your mobile blog using a free URL redirection service.

Step 1.

Create a sub-domain like say http://m.mtaram.com

Step 2.

Open your Blogs RSS feeds within Google Reader. The URL looks like http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/mmwd [the bold part is the RSS feed of my Blog via Feedburner]. You can use any RSS feed or burn your own Feed using Feedburner.

We need to modify this URL for mobile view. To do so add a /m/ to the URL between reader and view. http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/mmwd.

Step 3.

This can be done in two ways.

First: You can permanently redirect http://m.<yourblog>.com to ">http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/<your feed url>

Second: You can create an index.php file and specify the redirection in the index.php

Open a notepad file and copy paste the following

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: <your blog url>" );
?>

where you would be replacing <your blog url> with the modified Google Reader URL.

And you are done. Pass on the ULR of your mobile blog to your fellows and readers and enjoy.

Apart from this there is a plugin for wordpress that detects the device and renders the blog. But some how I did not like it and opted for this faster and easier method.

I started blogging and tweeting just in december 2009. ( though my twitter a/c was an inactive bot for almost a year). after my friend asked me to join in and start haveing some learning with him www.mtaram.com , I was confused, scary, inquisitive and whatnot. But my friend kept patience, gave me asnwers to most of my questions which I indeed took time to understand. Today, I love to tweet, to blog, and to manage wordpress data. I love to work on website content, layout, color combination and soo much more. During all this we changed the website look and feel. Am sure once you visit , I can look at your valuable comments:). We used some good techniques to make it worth and honestly it helped. I share all those things with my friends and readers:). I am sure it would help them as well .

1) Major Change : You can make a major change to it by adding a new design, or adding a forum to it or something minor like changing a title of a blog post.

2) Add a “back to top” link to footer:Blogs have a tendency to create huge scroll bars. Whether that scroll bar is long because you don’t use the more tag to cut down your posts, or you get a lot of blog comments – the fact of the matter is if you have a huge scroll bar and no easy way to get back to the top, it will annoy us as your readers.

So when a user gets to the bottom of the page and sees the link, when the click it – they go to the very top of the page. It’s very easy to create. Just use this code and add it to your footer somewhere:

<a href=”#header”>Back to top</a>

It’s just that easy. When that link gets clicked, it automatically shoots to the top of the page.

3) Adding ICONS: Every minor detail counts when it comes to designing for a blog. It’s the minor details that make some designs so excellent, and adding icons next to links on your blog can really make some parts of your blog stellar looking.

3)Input Forms :Input forms are used all the time on blogs. To sign up for newsletters, to fill out a comment, and anything else that generally involves getting information from the user.Input forms without style are often very ugly and boring to use.

4) Creating thumbnails for posts : Thumbnails are good to attract people. It looks good and fun. People enjoy thumbnails more and more. It makes them more active than compared to Just text. So lets add some colors and make it match with our layput and design theme.

5)Numbered page navigation :Try putting a list of pages you can visit on the blog. All of those numbers link to a page full of articles on them.Using numbered page navigation gets a lot more posts available to readers, which increases pageviews and can really show off the age of your blog with the more number of pages you have. It is a much more effective method of navigation than the standard “previous” and “next”post links that is standard on many blogs today.