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iPhone, iPhone, What Do You See?

brown_bear
I see an iPhone enabled site looking at me.

One change with new web site and blog is the ability for both to format themselves on the iPhone and on other touch-type smart phones. This makes for quicker loading and painless viewing of both sites when seen by those on the go.

JonRoemer.com on the iPhone:

iphone_web_site

Learning to See on the iPhone:

iphone_blog

For JonRoemer.com this is a feature built into the web site’s structure. It replaces my hand built, hand maintained, iPhone site which ran concurrent with the old JonRoemer.com.

For the blog, being on a WordPress platform, flexibility is the name of the game. I tried three mobile versions of the blog, each promised a simple design, but only one delivered on design, ease of use, and worked out of the box. The mobile theme I’m using is WPtouch iPhone Theme. It has many options built-in, all accessed via WordPress’ settings menu, it couldn’t be easier. If I had to change one thing with WPtouch iPhone Theme, I’d want the ability to not have the calendar month and day as an icon with each post on the homepage. That’s it. This WordPress Plug-in is incredibly well made and well documented.

The two other iPhone mobile themes I tried were Carrington Mobile and Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin. The former looked to be even simpler in feel than WPtouch but it did not reformat blog photos for smaller phone screens leading to half of each image being cropped out. The latter promised to automatically create a site that mimicked Learning to See but other than orange links it looked nothing like Learning to See and it too had image problems. It dropped many images when viewed on the phone leaving placeholder icons instead.

Apologies to Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. of children’s book fame. If you have kids or grandkids, if you ever babysat kids who are in the board-book stage, you know their work. Hopefully, I won’t have an angry author and illustrator looking at me.