Mobilise your Wordpress Blog

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With the enormous success of the iPhone and the recent announcement from Google on the Nexus device, more and more people are using mobile devices to browse and read content on the Internet.  Most modern devices come equipped with a decent mobile version of a browser which allows most well designed and built sites to be easily read on these devices.
However if you run a blog it can be a little tiresome to read on a small screen especially if the site contains a lot of content.  Thankfully help is at hand there are tools available that will render your site in a mobile device friendly way, and more importantly you wont need a degree in computer science to set it all up.

My preferred choice of tool to mobilize a Wordpress blog is the plug-in called WPtouch you can find this in the Wordpress plug-in directory from within your Wordpress dashboard.  Simply install the plug-in from either within your Dashboard or manually by uploading the files into your wp-content directory located on your web server.  Once you have installed the plug-in, you simply activate it from the plug-in screen.

After activation is complete you will be taken to the WPtouch settings screen.  On this screen you will find a larger number of options that will allow you to customise the look and feel of the mobile version of the blog.  In brief here are some of the options that you can configure:

  • Site title
  • Default home page for mobile viewing
  • Post listing options
  • Display tags or categories
  • Site colours and fonts
  • Custom Icons
  • Adsense and other stats codes

Once you are happy with the settings you simply click the save settings button and you are essentially done.

If you then navigate to your blog from a mobile browser you should see the mobile version of the blog being displayed.  You will note that at the bottom of the screen you will see a switch so that your users can switch back to the normal non mobile optimized version if they prefer.  Comments and other normal Wordpress features will continue to function as normal in the mobile optimized view.

In summary WPtouch provides you with a quick and easy way to enable your Wordpress blog for mobile devices.  Other solutions are available but some of these can be more tricky to setup and configure or do incur a small charge.

As a cautionary note I would recommend that prior to installing this plug-in you do take a backup of your blog database and any other important blog files.

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