Diggriver.com
Digg’s mobile site diggriver.com has relaunched and both looks a works great. You can even login and digg stories right from your mobile now. I don’t know about you, but when I’m sitting on the train or, lets face it, on the can, thats a prime digg reading moment for me and has now improved quite a bit.
Nice work.
More Updates to the Mobile Blog Reader
Isn’t it great when you invent something on your personal website that you can use on a project at your new job so you basically get to spend a day working on improving your personal project while getting paid?
Here’s the changes to our Mobile Blog Reader:
I gutted the MagpieRSS core and poured in a new SimplePie core. SimplePie does somethings I had to write myself in the first version all by itself, plus gives us more flexibility for the next feature. That and development is actually moving forward as opposed to lifeless and cold like a CSI extra.
We now support the reading of podcasts! Try the Naughty Sheets feed, its a podcast of erotic stories, found it on Google today. For each post that has an associated mp3 file, it loads an instance of a flash player and allows you to play the podcast right there on the page. Very cool.
I also changed socks half way through finishing this up tonight. I was walking in the linoleum closet I call my kitchen and I stepped in some water. I hate it when that happens.
If any of those changes bothered you, let me know. If you find a bug, let me know. If you love it, let me know. If you hate it, let me know. If you are hungry, here’s a suggestion…make a bread pizza.
Mobile Blog Reader Upgrade
Today the Mobile Blog Reader got a mini-upgrade. You could always simply enter the base url of the desired site and we would find the RSS feed for you and display it, but I also heard requests for the ability to put in a RSS url directly and have that pull up. Well you can do that now too. So you can either enter a website and we’ll do the work or you can input a link right to a RSS file and we’ll display that for you too.
Finding time lately is an issue, but if I can, I have a few other features for the Mobile Blog Viewer soon. As always, if any of you have feature requests, I’d love to hear them.
One Crazy Saturday Night
So I’m posting this from my couch, but not on my laptop via standard wifi, but rather on my cellphone via its EDGE connection. I’m doing this through a beta test of a new multi-platform, web-based mobile blogging tool. I can’t say much more about it yet, but I will say that, although rough, its showing promise.
Isn’t it amazing the mobile web awareness explosion that has happened in this circle of the web over the last week? From the quick adoption of Dave Winer’s River, and our very own Mobile Blog Reader, to the very project I’m testing now . I can’t wait to see what comes next, and I hope to keep being a part of it.
I must say I had impecible timing picking up my new phone right?
Windows Mobile Nintendo Emulation
I’ve just spent the past hour searching the net for a good NES or SNES or GameBoy emulator for my T-Mobile MDA running Windows Mobile 5. PocketSNES mostly worked playing Super Mario Cart. No sound, and the buttons didn’t set well. gnuboy looked promising, but I couldn’t get it to install.
Does anyone know of an opensource game system emulator for Windows Mobile 5 phones? I would love some help on this one.
Dave Winer’s River vs Mike Flynn’s Mobile Viewer
Talk of Dave Winer’s mobile news reading “river” is seemingly everywhere. If you don’t know, Dave recently made a way for people to easily read news on their mobile device by creating custom displays of popular websites: TechCrunch.com, NYTimes.com…etc. Inspired by Dave’s idea and knowing Britney Spears will be thin again before Dave ever gets around to making a “river” version of Hell Yeah Bitch! .com, I decided to make a very simple way to take our, or anyone else’s RSS feed and display it for mobile devices. Dave’s has been getting tons of traffic I assume, but even my little mobile viewer has been getting its share of usage lately as well. All this mobile web development over the past few days as started much more of a stir that I would have thought, I think its time I clear a few things up on my end.
1. Isn’t all this re-inventing the wheel? Haven’t you seen Bloglines Mobile or any of the RSS readers out there?
No, its not reinventing the wheel. I’ll get in to this in a different article though, because its seems too broad for this. (which I hope to post later today)
2. How are Dave Winer’s different from yours?
Other than the fact that I’m a Dave Winer Wannabe and Dave is Dave Winer…actually a lot. Granted what I know about Dave’s has been gleaned from scant posts and a flickr comment discussion, but there’s plenty. Dave’s is based on OPML, he is working on it to become a platform of sort for generating customized news, and he’s Dave freaking Winer, so I’m sure there’s more going on thats just not out yet. Mine on the other hand is a very simple PHP page that just makes a cURL call to pull the page and auto-sense the feed, then it pulls the feed and displays the articles, on the fly, without styling. Like I said before, I was or am not under the illusion that mine is anywhere in the ballpark or the parking lot with Winer’s, but I made mine, like I said above, to cop that “river” feel on sites that he hasn’t yet made to work with his. Mine is extremely simple by design so that me or anyone else with a blog can plug in their url and make a mobile version without taking more that 10 seconds out of their day. Honestly I made it for my own using so that I can read all kinds of blogs easily on my phone, all the other people using it are bonus. Hell if someone even wants to redirect their url “mobile.[someblog].com” over to my Mobile Viewer, I have no problems with it (if you are a big site though, please let me know in advance). That all being said, if Winer ever makes his “river” public allowing us to put it on our own sites or allow us to use it on any site (guess that depends on how it works) then my little app will be quite useless for the most part. Until then, and probably after “then” too, my Mobile Viewer will be available for all to use for all blogs you want to read but don’t have in your RSS feed, or for you to make a mobile version with little to no configuration.
For any more questions, comments, suggestions or anything else, feel free to contact me.
Related: Hell Yeah Bitch! | View Mobile Versions of This or Any Other Blog
View Mobile Versions of This or Any Other Blog
Quick version:
After frustration over viewing blogs on my cell phone, I made not only a mobile verion of Hell Yeah Bitch! .com, but an interface that any mobile user can use to view any site with an RSS feed and not be bothered by excess styling and such. Check it out right here: hellyeahbitch.com/mobile
Long Version:
I recently got a Windows Mobile Smart phone (the T-Mobile MDA) and I love it. However, I soon found out that trying to read a website on it sucked. I really like the RSS reader PRSS, but I’m not much of a “feed collector” I’m old school in the way that I just like to visit sites and read whats there. I was beginning to think that everyone just used RSS readers on their mobile devices until I read Robert Scoble issuing my very same complaint on his site earlier this week. Robert followed up that complaint with jubilation today as he demoed Dave Winer‘s mobile version of TechCrunch: techcrunch.scripting.com Give it a click and check it out. Its just the content part of TechCrunch with little to no styling. For Robert and I, it was the answer to our dreams:
This rocks. Rocks. Rocks. Now I can read TechCrunch while walking around tonight’s TechCrunch party.
I hope Dave wraps up this server-side aggregator and gets every blogger to implement it so I can read every blog on my phone.
Thanks Dave for scratching my itch.
I commented on this article too with equal excitement. But after thinking about it for a second, I decided to wait on Dave, but instead make my own. So after an hour of coding and a few hours of playing with it, I give you the Hell Yeah Bitch! Mobile Site Viewer (hellyeabitch.com/mobile) Its simple. Its easy. It does just what I want it to do and nothing more.
Yes, I know about Bloglines Mobile. But I prefer this. With our version you don’t need to sign up, or create a site list of your feeds, all you do is just plug in a URL and read what they have in there feed. It doesn’t keep track of what you have read and what you haven’t. It never will. This isn’t an RSS reader, this is just a way to view a site in a nice format for your mobile device. I have an RSS reader app on my T-Mobile MDA, and I still will. I will use the Hell Yeah Bitch! Mobile Site Viewer to read any and all blogs (or anything with a feed) that just need to peak at and read.
Notes:
I said “blog” because the app is dependent on the target site having a RSS feed. Specifically RSS. At this time it doesn’t support a site that just has an ATOM feed. UPDATE 8/22/06: It now supports ATOM feeds.
If you use the option to remove HTML from the listings, I still translate new line characters into
‘s so the paragraphs stay correct.
Yes, unlike Dave Winers, I styled the page with a little bit of CSS. If you want to turn that off you can with the “No Styling” option. I’m sorry I can’t send something out the door with out at least a little subtle styling…it’ll catch cold!
I should say that its built off of MagpieRSS which is great.
Future features? If more people than me end up using this, I would love to put a list of the most viewed sites on the front page. Kind of like community bookmarks. Other than that, I see no more features added. This was meant to be simple. It will stay that way.
Like I said before, I made this in a little over an hour earlier today so there will be a few bugs that I haven’t caught in my use in the last few hours. Please contact me with any bug reports, feature requests, or undying affection you have for me.
Ok I have to stop writing this and playing with the code, my girlfriend is yelling at me from the living room, I should go. (Yeah, the mobile web is cool, but this is a living, breathing girl!) Please leave any notes here or contact me directly.
Some recent comments from bloggers on our Mobile Blog Viewer:
Craig Burton:
Doc Searls has the same quote on his blog today as well.
We also received a comment from Make Magazine’s Phil Torrone on his flickr post:
Phil Torrone thinks its neat. Seriously, thats awesome.
Its great to see such a simple thing with minimal options do as well as it is. I mentioned to Craig on his blog that if the level of traffic keeps this high, I might be moved to giving it its own “proper” domain name. We’ll see if the traffic stays this high, but either way, its cool to see people using it and giving good feedback.