Dec 1, 2009
Fort Worthology Mobile Edition
By: Joel Burns
Editor’s note: Fort Worth District 9 City Councilman Joel Burns wrote to us not long ago expressing his fondness for the iPhone/mobile version of Fort Worthology, and wanted to share it with our readers who might not know about this way to view the site.
I recently realized that Fort Worthology (with a little help from
WordPress) has a beautiful, simple, intuitive mobile version for iPhones,
Android, and other mobile formats (something longer-running Cowtown media
institutions such as NBC-5 and the Fort Worth Weekly still unfortunately lack).
This may have been announced before, but I wanted to send out a little
reminder to fellow readers. What’s more, iPhone users can save Fort Worthology’s
mobile site to a home screen, much like an app. Here’s a screenshot of my
iPhone from this morning with my Fort Worthology icon fittingly nestled
amongst the likes of the NY Times and BBC:
Thanks again for all that you do, Kevin.
–Joel Burns
And thank you, Joel! We announced the Fort Worthology iPhone site a while back, but we haven’t mentioned it in a while. It’s a great way for iPhone, iPod touch, Google Android, and other mobile browser users to interact with the site. Here’s a bit more about it:
The Fort Worthology mobile site presents a clean, simple interface for the entire site to users on mobile devices. The home screen looks like this, with a listing of post titles, along with their dates, categories, and tags. If a post has comments, the number of comments shows up as a red badge on the publish date. (And yes, the interface works just as well in landscape orientation.)
Tapping the small arrow to the right of the post title drops down an excerpt from the beginning of the post. This is a quick way to get an idea of what the post is about.
Tapping the post’s title loads the full post view. At the top is a bit of publishing info about the post, along with a link to skip to the comments section. Everything is automatically resized and reformatted for display on an iPhone/iPod touch/etc.
Photos show up in full post mode as well, automatically resized to fit the screen.
At the bottom is a list of the post’s categories and tags, along with a link to mail the post or bookmark it on Delicious, Digg, Technorati, Magnolia, Newsvine, or Reddit. Navigation links allow you to move backwards or forwards through the posts.
Below this are the comments. You can read existing comments or publish new ones.
The mobile site has other features as well. You can browse by tag by clicking on tags in posts, or you can browse by category using the drop-down menu at the top of the site.
Another drop-down gives you a search box, allowing you to search the entire site.
Finally, another drop-down gives you access to pages like the Urban Living guide (which is in the progress of being updated, by the way), along with links to things like the site’s RSS feed.
Thanks again to District 9 Councilman Joel Burns for sending us the note about the mobile site!
Those of us that use Google Reader on the iPhone to read the RSS feeds do not see the mobile site. You can test this using http://www.google.com/gwt/n. Try entering http://www.nytimes.com and it correctly detects that there is a mobile site and simply redirects. Enter http://www.fortworthology.com and it will try to reformat the normal site rather than redirecting. Perhaps there is a header you need to include to provide a hint to the Google proxy.
The mobile site rocks. I just wish I could use it via the RSS feed and Google Reader.
jb,
It’s a bug I’ve known about for just a little while. I’m working on it as I get the chance. We’ve had some problems with the RSS feeds in general. I plan to get this fixed as soon as I nail down the cause (the mobile site is due for an overhaul in the not-too-distant future anyway).
I’d love it if some of our local papers/blogs (FW Star-Telegram, FW Weekly, even FW-ology) could get dedicated apps versus web apps. Call me picky, but I don’t like using screen real estate for a web app (opening multiple windows in Safari seems a bit clunky).
That being said, Kevin’s site is pretty slick. I read the feed through a separate RSS reader app. It (unfortunately) only gives me a truncated version of the entire post – but then it launches the mobile site within the app if I want to read further.
Joel…Only 657 emails this morning?
What’s the URL to force the mobile site to load? You’re not correctly recognizing the Palm Pre useragent. The normal site loads instead.
Jonathan,
Pre support is something I’ve been planning. I will likely be rolling out a new version of the mobile site this week that should have native Pre support. Until then, give this a try:
http://fortworthology.com/?bnc_view=mobile
(Note – this likely only works if you’re actually on a mobile device when you load that URL.)
JP,
The truncated RSS feeds are a bug. I have intended that they display the full post, but there’s something in WordPress that’s misbehaving that I haven’t tracked down yet.
The reason you’re getting the mobile site from your RSS reader (which is the intended effect) is because that app is passing the site off to Safari, which correctly determines that you want the mobile site. For whatever reason, Google Reader is going directly to the standard site in a way that bypasses the mobile check. That’s the bug I’m working on.
As for an actual app – I agree! I can’t speak for the other guys, but as for us, there *are* Fort Worthology-branded iPhone apps (plural) in the works, including a dedicated app based around the mobile site. It’s just slow going as I am attempting to do the coding myself and, well, I don’t have experience and am having to learn to code as I go.
You should try coding a Pre app too. It’s already pretty easy since all apps on webOS are coded in html, css and javascript (which you probably know already from working on your websites) and a drag and drop development environment is coming soon:
http://www.precentral.net/ares-webos-development-browser-drag-n-drop-coming-later-year
As for that link, no worky. I’ll have to wait for your next update.
Holy Moley, he has so many emails!