Anyone using a PDA or phone to visit the site? If you are, do you have any problems? What can I do that would help?
Hugs,
Erin
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Mobile Phones and such....
I often view this site, and read stories, using my PDA/Phone. PocketIE automatically turns the site into a single column, and that's ok, except it stacks the columns in order. Left on top, middle in the middle, and right on the bottom. This means to get to the new stories, I have sto scroll through all the latest comments, and blog posts, and everything BEFORE getting to what I came looking for. A separate index, with maybee a different set of columns would be great for me :) The stories themselves load decently fine, altho the indented story boxes takes up a little more space than it needs to on the mobile. If you need any help creating or testing a new mobile interface just let me know.
-Piper
I actually LIKE image SIGs!
RSS option
I also wanted to add that I've tried using RSS to get the latest stories too, but with RSS you only get the last 5 or 10 posts, which includes the link to quick links block and all the latest blog posts... so on a busy day, you don't end up with much useful info, so a separate RSS feed with ONLY the latest stories might help, one where you could request the latest x number of stories with a url variable (eg, storyrss.php?num=25 )would be awesome, but I still haven't found a GREAT free RSS reader for WM5/6 yetr
-Pipef
I actually LIKE image SIGs!
Feed link RSS
The feed link in the top right corner of the main screen has the 50 latest posts and leaves out all the ads and most of the side bars. It's cranky though, you sometimes have to load it twice to get it to work.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Now that you mention it
I've tried accessing BC using a Blackjack 2 w/ Windows Mobile and the supplied Internet Explorer browser, not sure of the versions but the phone is new. Unlike Piper, my supplied IE browser does not place everything into a single column. Instead, you must manually scroll across the page, which doesn't sound that bad until you understand that the side to side scrolling on this phone goes from link to link, so for instance it takes a lot of scrolling to get across the top with all those clickable links.
If you can find a way to do so, take a look at the major news organizations' mobile pages for what looks good. Reduced number of links that are clustered at the top and bottom of the pages, one column, and my favorite - a Back To Top link at the bottom of the page. USAToday, MSNBC, and FoxNews all have nice, easy to navigate mobile pages.
I was hesitant to mention it before because it probably takes a major amount of programming to set up a mobile webpage. At present I only use it to keep up with the comments on busy days. Any stories I try to copy and send as a file to my phone, then I can use Office Mobile to read it.
Karen J.
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Single Column - PIE
To get PocketIE to load in a single column, when viewing someing in IE, click [MENU] (should be the bottom right button) then "View" then select "One Column" from the menu. That will convert all multi-column pages into a single column as I described above. I use it as I don't like scrolling back and forth across the page. :) I use this both on a AT&T TILT (HTC TyTN II PDA Phone, running WM6) and on a T-Mobile SDA (HTC Typhon, Smartphone [no touchscreen] running WM6).
And posting/commenting IS a pain :) but I usually wait till I'm at a REAL pc to do that. :) It's been a while since I tried the site on my Nokia n82, but I don't remember it being all that different, and once I find the charger for my Treo 600 I'll load the site in it's browser and see what it does :)
I seem to go through a LOT of phones -giggles-
-Piper
I actually LIKE image SIGs!
Thanks, Piper
I've seen that, I'll give it a try. This is my first new phone in years, my previous was a Nokia 6340i, didn't do anything except make calls and text, which I never use. Like all new tech I buy, I worry about hitting a button by mistake and having to go back to the story and tell the 20-something salesman I don't know how to fix it. He already had to set it up to sync with my laptop, I locked everything up when I tried. :-(
Edit/Add That's better, except the homepage was still about twice the screen width. It tracked that down to the story "Royal Sissy" by Dauphin. For some reason the Title Box is much wider than the rest. The box width seems to vary from story to story, "The Guardian of Sharon's Rose is almost as wide.
KJT
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Looks great on my 6210 (mini-map browser)
Single column but still looks great. The option to rotate the screen works great (I use vertical mode for the main page and read story in horizontal mode).
Commenting is a bit of a pain but possible .
Blackberry 8700
Erin,
I just learn to live with the problems it gives me. On some pages, particularly the story pages, I just go to the view printable page so I don't get the graphichs that cause it to give me the story in a little column on the left side and a graphic column on the right. Also, it seems to help those pages with the overly large fonts to do that. Also, like someone else, mostly one column (except on story pages sometimes) with left side first, middle next, followed up with the right column. This makes logging in a pain (if you can log in with the particular device without getting "The Requested Page can not be displayed" loke I just got). Otherwise, I just make do with what I have and it works well enough. They don't call it the bleedin' edge for nothing! Take care and thanks for all you do for us whiners and complainers! /hug
Diana
now what did I do with that rant about that new rope they were gonna use?
edit: Forgot to mention that the login on the left would be nice :) /hug
The reversi theme ...
Switches the right and left columns around so that would make logging in easier. Mmm? Maybe I should put a login link in the header?
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Oops, broke my bb browser
Trying opera mini 4.1 and working great. Using it to type this reply and has a Mobile View feature that puts everything in one column. At least I am not getting that error after login anymore... :). Take care and will do more testing and let you know what I find out.
Diana
Ps forgot to ask if I could create a new accout to test my browser with different themes
No problems
on the Nokia N800 or N810 with the latest version of OS2008 installed. The only minor complaint would be that there is so much content on the main page it takes the handheld device a long time to render the page before you can navigate around on it. Previous versions of the OS (OS2007) / browser (Opera??) crashed with the amount of content on the main page.
The Nokia E61i browser and interface is terrible so I mainly use the N810. I seem to remember I had problems with the browser on the E61i crashing about 20% of the time on the main page.
Hope the info was of some help.
Arwen
Great on PSP
if a little memory intensive- I can't read anything on Julie O's page really because of memory limitations.
Melanie E.
Iphone
I use my Iphone all the time to access the site ( including now).
It's brilliant for reading stories, especially landscape. A little slow for writing comments.
Overall much better than IE with mobile 5 on my last smartphone.
Hope this is useful info.
Hugs,
Alys
Heh!
I'll tell my brother. His team at Apple did the port of Safari over to the iPhone. :) I don't have an iPhone because ATT service in the mountains here sucks big yellow rocks.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.