Mobile Meta

June 11, 2007 1:39 PM

I'd really like to be able to browse the meta* sites on my brand spanky new Pocket PC mobile phone gps thing, but IE keeps squishing all the text into a very very narrow column. Is there a plain formatting version of the meta sites? Or some other mobile friendly alternative?
posted by lemonfridge to MetaFilter-related at 1:39 PM (12 comments total)

Oh, and recommendations for Pocket PC (with WiFi and GPS) are very welcome.
posted by lemonfridge at 1:40 PM on June 11, 2007

How about I add margin:0 to the copy class in handheld.css? Would that work?
posted by mathowie at 1:51 PM on June 11, 2007

If you go through Google Mobile to get there, it's easy peasy. First, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n, which allows you to type (tap) in the URL of the site you wish to visit. Once you've done this for MeFi, the site looks like this - bookmark the page on your mobile browser and you're golden.

I use a Dell Axim x50v, which has WiFi. I've added a bluetooth GPS and ther requisite software. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it as Dell is discontinuing their Pocket PC PDAs. I'd imagine a big reason is the Pocket PC mobile phones are all the rage now.
posted by SteveInMaine at 1:58 PM on June 11, 2007

Have you tried LoFi?
posted by stopgap at 3:06 PM on June 11, 2007

Do older pocket pc/windows mobile devices pay attention to handheld.css? You may have to do a browser detect/redirect.
posted by GuyZero at 4:15 PM on June 11, 2007

I can't comment on the appropriate CSS tagging, but I get the same narrow column experience on both MeFi and MeFi/lofi. I'm using a Nokia N95, which has a pretty great full HTML browser.

Curious about the handheld.css--what triggers that? UAProf?

Note as well the comment about rendering well if you go through Google . . . that's cuz Google is pushing pages you access through their site through Squeezer, which frankly is kind of annoying since the Goog is usurping the page author's desired formatting.
posted by donovan at 6:17 PM on June 11, 2007

I used to read MeFi on my PDA back around 2002 or so. Good god, that's an ordeal.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:24 PM on June 11, 2007

I used to browse on a dinosaur Samsung i700. LoFi always worked best for me. The Google option mentioned above was awesome when it worked, which was about 25% of the time. I have no idea why it crapped out on me the rest of the time.
posted by carsonb at 7:28 PM on June 11, 2007

Have you tried Opera Mobile?
posted by gyc at 7:48 PM on June 11, 2007

Google is pushing pages you access through their site through Squeezer, which frankly is kind of annoying since the Goog is usurping the page author's desired formatting.

If the author's "desired formatting" is entirely unusable on my handheld, I really don't care if it is "usurped."
posted by grouse at 2:52 AM on June 12, 2007

Opera Mini will solve your ills.

Also, I get all of MeFi in a narrow column on Mozilla 1.3, until I resize the window.
posted by bonaldi at 7:55 AM on June 12, 2007

ok, I managed to get IE woking better by setting the view option to "one column".

I'm giving Opera a try but the same setting doesn't have the same effect. So now I'm torn between IE and it's page layout, and Opera with it's drag scrolling.

Ideas?

(Using the Pocket PC to post!)
posted by lemonfridge at 3:24 PM on June 12, 2007