Make a Mobile Friendly Blog with Google Reader

In today's world of high mobility, the technology savvy are now finding it uneasy to log in a computer every time they want to check some thing online. One of the things that people look out for is blogs and articles as per their needs.

This has resulted in creating websites that are accessible on mobile phones! And when general websites are tryig to 'mobile savvy' , then why should be blogs behind?

But here too size does matter !!! Most visitors are not interested in the sidebars, navigation areas and other design elements - all they want to see is a simple listing of your blog posts. If they like to read a post, they can click the title and a mobile friendly version of that page should open on the screen of their cell phone.

Keeping this in mind, Google has come out with a software Google Reader that allows us to create mobile freindly blogs.

• Google Reader : Google Reader can generate an excellent mobile view of your RSS feed without any effort. Just append your feed address to the following URL and your mobile blog is ready. http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/[feed_address]

  And here’s a live example - use your mobile phone to see the awesome page rendering http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http://www.itvidya.com/blog/imran/feed

  Call this link "Mobile Site" and place it somewhere at the top of your blog design so mobile phone users will notice it instantly and switch to the mobile view.

• mofuse.com : The next solution is to create a free account at www.mofuse.com and they’ll give a personal mobile website with a .mobi address - something like http://itvidya.mofuse.mobi/. If you have self-hosted blog like on WordPress or Blogger Custom domains, you can easily setup the mobile edition of your site on a subdomain (e.g. m.itvidya.com) - it is short and your users can easily guess the URL since almost all popular sites now follow the m. convention.

WordPress users are lucky as there’s a plugin that will automatically detect if the client is a mobile phone browser and it then renders a mobile friendly version of the blog to the visitor.