zondag, april 20, 2008
about2findout.mobi : what I learned so far
Here is what I wanted to share on making the limited mobile web version of the site:
- There is a special domain extension available for mobile sites: .mobi . As my normal registrant that I use for .com and other domains (directnic.com) did not offer .mobi domains, I registered it very cheap on godaddy.com . Godaddy.com is probably one of the biggest or the biggest web domain registrant and they offer a lot of add-on services. In fact, they are so commercially oriented it's very hard not to just buy what you wanted without anything more :-). I redirected the about2findout.mobi site to a subsection of the existing site, as it is in fact just part of the same asp.net web application. (www.about2findout.com/mobile)
- It was hard to choose what to implement and what not. So far it is a very limited site compared to the full web brother, but I hope just enough for mobile phones and their limited bandwidth and screen size.
- I wanted to make it look a little like iPhone applications. Apple does have a SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone, but I didn't find my way in it immediately, and besides I have no time to learn yet another platform or programming language. As far as I know there are no 'iPhone button generators' on the net available, so I ended up making the buttons on the well known mycoolbutton.com, and adjusting them manually for size.
- If you want to test how your site looks like on an iPhone Safari browser, go to iphonetester.com .
- Windows Mobile devices and the provided Pocket Internet Explorer have a lot of issues with an asp.net Ajax enabled web site. The CSS style sheets don't always behave in the same way as on a computer, and for example the ProgressPanel didn't behave well. So I removed a lot of ajax functions in the end. It is possible to run limited Asp.net Ajax functionality on Windows Mobile version 6 or higher, but I just didn't want to figure out what works and what doesn't. If you have that time however, you can start with this excellent video tutorial on MSDN.
- If you make your mobile site with ASP.NET 2.0 on Visual Studio 2005, you will need to update the browsercap files, so that your site would recognize the Windows Mobile 6 platform. There is a good article on how to do that here (Jim Wilson).
- There is a special domain extension available for mobile sites: .mobi . As my normal registrant that I use for .com and other domains (directnic.com) did not offer .mobi domains, I registered it very cheap on godaddy.com . Godaddy.com is probably one of the biggest or the biggest web domain registrant and they offer a lot of add-on services. In fact, they are so commercially oriented it's very hard not to just buy what you wanted without anything more :-). I redirected the about2findout.mobi site to a subsection of the existing site, as it is in fact just part of the same asp.net web application. (www.about2findout.com/mobile)
- It was hard to choose what to implement and what not. So far it is a very limited site compared to the full web brother, but I hope just enough for mobile phones and their limited bandwidth and screen size.
- I wanted to make it look a little like iPhone applications. Apple does have a SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone, but I didn't find my way in it immediately, and besides I have no time to learn yet another platform or programming language. As far as I know there are no 'iPhone button generators' on the net available, so I ended up making the buttons on the well known mycoolbutton.com, and adjusting them manually for size.
- If you want to test how your site looks like on an iPhone Safari browser, go to iphonetester.com .
- Windows Mobile devices and the provided Pocket Internet Explorer have a lot of issues with an asp.net Ajax enabled web site. The CSS style sheets don't always behave in the same way as on a computer, and for example the ProgressPanel didn't behave well. So I removed a lot of ajax functions in the end. It is possible to run limited Asp.net Ajax functionality on Windows Mobile version 6 or higher, but I just didn't want to figure out what works and what doesn't. If you have that time however, you can start with this excellent video tutorial on MSDN.
- If you make your mobile site with ASP.NET 2.0 on Visual Studio 2005, you will need to update the browsercap files, so that your site would recognize the Windows Mobile 6 platform. There is a good article on how to do that here (Jim Wilson).
Labels: .mobi, about2findout.mobi, ajax, asp.net, mobile
