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.
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.
Google: If It Ain’t Broke, There Aren’t Enough Features
Hey everybody! Google has added an RSS reader to GMail. Now if someone can let me know why the hell anyone needs this, than you get the gold star for today. Like usual, when Google does anything new everyone starts creaming in their jeans, and this new “feature” Google has added to GMail is no different. Unlike most though, I’m using the term “feature” extremely loosely. Mainly because the term “feature” would imply that its a usefull addition, and adding a stupid RSS reader to a email interface is not a usefull addition. If I need to be checking my GMail and then with one click check the latest postings on my favorite sites, I don’t need Google to help me do that. I’ve been able to do that for a while now with tabs, or live bookmarks in Firefox, or an RSS bookmark in Safari, so why do I need another way to do this?
Google’s addition of an useless RSS reader is just a sign that Google really is going to be the next Microsoft. Microsoft is famous for adding useless features just so they can say that they’ve added a feature. Out of all those menus in Word, how many do you actually use? Thats what I thought. All that crap was added a little at a time, thrown in my programmers that had to show something to their boss and allowed them to pad their “New Features” list, all the while no one stopped to think if adding all these was even worth it in the long run. Very typical of big companies like Microsoft, and now, Google.
Whats next? A quick way to view videos from Google Video from my GMail interface? Or maybe a way that I can click on any word and it will search Froogle for the best price on it? All things you can do with a few clicks now, but if they continue things like that, all it will do is take a good thing that did one job suitably well (I’ve never really been a fan of GMail’s interface) and clog it up and stretch it too thin.
Please Google, just let GMail be an email client, and thats all.
Come to think of it, I use the POP access anyway, so I guess I don’t care after all.