Recent Blog Posts:
Category Mobile - Web - Media
Date Friday, Sep 29, 2006 11:29:41 AM
MobileWebDeveloper.com VS .mobi
When explaining on my blog how companies can use their current URL for their mobile sites, I received a reply from the General Manager of www.mtld.mobi:
"An elegant, self-detecting technical solution is not in reach of the everyday small business owner or individual." (Neil Edwards on 04/10/2006)
That 'elegant, self-detecting solution' will soon be available, in PHP, CFML and ASP! I call it MobileRedirect. I'm also providing a mobile website 'rapid development framework' for PHP and CFML called MobileLaunch, which brings a quality mobile Website within the reach of anyone. Why would you want to use MobileRedirect and MobileLaunch? Because the people at .mobi think that such a solution will create an "ideal world," please read on...
In an ideal world, the client-side device type would direct the type of page served, but that is not how things have evolved.

The fact is the majority of the 80 plus million sites across the web do not work well on mobile devices and do not detect device type before redirecting you. (.mobi blog on 11/07/06)

Unfortunately, the folks at .mobi continue by stating that they've solved these problems by selling you yet another domain, when in fact, the problems would still exist after you buy a .mobi domain name.

MobileWebDeveloper.com not only serves to provide you with mobile Web solutions, but also tips, and suggestions on how to best plan your mobile site. In the coming weeks, I'll add a forum for developers, marketers and executives to interact and discuss mobile Web development. The forums will also provide users of MobileRedirect and MobileLaunch to interact and share how they've advanced the products.

I'll be making these two products available under a 'dual license':

  • GNU General Public License - Open source developers and projects
  • Commercial Software License: No Restrictions or requirements on use or distribution of our software in derivative works.

I hope to have both products launched in the next two weeks, until then, read the descriptions below and visit the site for more information.

MobileRedirect

Add MobileRedirect to your website, and use your current Web address as your Mobile address. It's easier for people to remember, and easier for you to promote. MobileRedirect provides a simple solution for detecting and redirecting mobile devices on your website. Available in multiple programming languages, takes a minute to setup and available as shareware, give it try!

MobileLaunch

With MobileLaunch, you can get your mobile website online today. It's a mobile site template system with multiple skins to choose from. Simply add your content, set 6 settings, install our included MobileRedirect code on your current Website, and you're live.



About the subject of this post: while I do not think there is any need for .mobi, and I feel the world should simply ignore .mobi's existence, you can definately use a .mobi name with MobileRedirect and MobileLaunch. Especially when you consider that my solutions are based around your current domain name and redirecting the initial request to your mobile site. Once the initial request is redirected, the URL of the actual mobile site could be: m.mySite.com, mobile.mySite.com, or even mySite.mobi - it's up to you. Just don't believe the hype, you still need a redirection setup on your current site, as most people will still use your .com address.

In conclusion, I'm not really fighting against .mobi, and I'll look over their style guides to make sure the generated code from MobileLaunch fits with their 'rules' - chances are, it already does since I'm currently generating 100% valid xHTML-MP, and supporting multiple header/content types (not all mobile devices can accept the same DocType or ContentType). I do want to say thank you to .mobi for making me angry, which in turn caused me to proclaim that I was going to provide these solutions back in April of this year. What's funny about this, is that the same thing happened back in 1999 with mp3.com. They kept changing things on the indie artists, making the expierence there more frustrating than fun. After a few months of that, I decided to build what is not ArtistServer.com . So now you know - if you want me to build something, just piss me off. :)



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Category ArtistServer
Date Thursday, Aug 25, 2005 1:51:21 PM
My competition is not valid. Well, at least their code isn't.
The other day I came across an html/xhtml validator link - so I ran the ArtistServer artist homepage through it and it came back with an obscene amount of errors.

http://validator.w3.org/

It turns out - none of the pages on ArtistServer validated as good code. This got me down. But then I ran several of my competitor's sites though the validator - and they too weren't validating.

All of my competition FAILED validation:

www.soundclick.com
www.dmusic.com
www.audiostreet.net
www.musicv2.com
music.download.com
www.ArtistLaunch.com
www.MagnaTune.com
www.GarageBand.com
www.Ampcast.com
www.em411.com
www.MySpace.com
www.Beatmaka.com


This was no excuse. Having valid code is key for many reasons - one of which, is that it improves the opportunity for search engines to index your site. If a spider is crawling through your code and it's filled w/ errors, it will skip your pages. I want to make clear here, that these errors I'm talking about are for the most part, "NOT" noticable to the user. I've been looking at ArtistServer for years - the pages always looked good and rendered well. Little did I know, my browser was ignoring a lot of simple errors.

If you are a geek, you might have noticed that I'm going with "DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional" and not "XHTML 1." At this point, I don't see a need to make those kinds of changes to the site. I also felt that getting the site to validate at it's current state would set us up for a better transition into "XHTML 1."

Funny thing about some of the sites on the Web that are doing well or are very busy as the 'new' thing - they don't validate either:

- www.backpackit.com - 6 errors - failed
- www.43things.com - 34 error - failed
- www.flickr.com - 6 errors - failed
- del.icio.us - failed - it wouldn't even parse it
- last.fm - 2 errors - failed
- www.boingboing.net - 132 errors - failed
- www.icerocket.com - 40 errors - failed

A few passed:
- www.rubyonrails.org - passed
- www.technorati.com - passed
- www.feedburner.com - passed

Ok - back to ArtistServer... why so many errors? One aspect has to do with the amperstand symbol being used in URLs. Any site which has variables passed in the URLs will not validate - period. This was news to me, and probably news to most Web developers, as I see most people have this very same problem.

I've sat down for three sessions and worked on modifying the code to get it all to validate. So far, I've cleaned up 16 pages, which includes all the pages in an artist account, the site homepage, the music page and most other key pages on the site. I have around 25-30 more pages to check. I'm happy to say that the main/core pages of ArtistServer are now valid!

Now for the rest of you developers out there... clean it up! :)

BTW - If you are an artist or member on ArtistServer, and you add HTML to your site, you may want to validate the code before you publish it to the site. Visit the following site to validate your code:

http://validator.w3.org/

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Gideon Marken
Web Technologist & Electronic Artist

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