A little more mobile friendly

Since I’m posting mobile photos and notes to this site rather than a third-party service I figured I’d make those pages a little more condusive to viewing on a mobile platform. Also, to make my life a little easier, I’ve also set up a few little scripts to do things like Twitter a link to my most recent mobile photo or note.

Here is how I’m doing it. I’m posting both mobile photos and notes with the WordPress iPhone application. If I have something to share that I can’t fit into 140-characters, I will be logging those posts into the mobile notes category. Rather than posting my mobile photos to Flickr or Brightkite I’ll be sharing them in the mobile photos category. The WordPress iPhone application automatically resizes the photos to no more than 640-pixels wide. Both the mobile notes and photos will be linked to from Twitter, automatically, using a similar syntax of "Mobile photo: "Title of photo" – LINK".

The script I’m using for this is the same one I was using for posting photos, links, etc to Pownce. I’ve since updated it and will be sharing that code here once I’ve licked a few bugs, integrated it with Bit.ly instead of TinyURL, and made it a little easier to configure. I’m using Dreamhost’s fairly simple CRON job panel to run this script every 10 minutes. Stay tuned for that code in the near future.

I’ve also made a slight change to the way the Mobile photos category is displayed. Instead of just showing the title of the mobile photo this page now shows a small thumbnail of the image. Since these images can be in both portrait and landscape modes, I had to do some jiggery pokery to only show a portion of the image, without resizing them. Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for helping me with some of the CSS.

Viewing these pages on a mobile phone with a browser that supports text only will still be a bear, I’m sure, but they should load much faster now on iPhones, iPod touches, Android-powered phones, and the upcoming Palm Pre.

For my next trick, I’ll be changing the way the videos category and posts are displayed.

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