Comments on: Mobile Meta

Mobile Meta

lemonfridge — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:39:15 -0800

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?

By: lemonfridge

lemonfridge — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:40:13 -0800

Oh, and recommendations for Pocket PC (with WiFi and GPS) are very welcome.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:51:53 -0800

How about I add margin:0 to the copy class in handheld.css? Would that work?

By: SteveInMaine

SteveInMaine — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:58:16 -0800

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.

By: stopgap

stopgap — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 15:06:25 -0800

Have you tried LoFi?

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:15:24 -0800

Do older pocket pc/windows mobile devices pay attention to handheld.css? You may have to do a browser detect/redirect.

By: donovan

donovan — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:17:17 -0800

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.

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:24:49 -0800

I used to read MeFi on my PDA back around 2002 or so. Good god, that's an ordeal.

By: carsonb

carsonb — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:28:15 -0800

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.

By: gyc

gyc — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 19:48:09 -0800

Have you tried Opera Mobile?

By: grouse

grouse — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 02:52:38 -0800

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."

By: bonaldi

bonaldi — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 07:55:44 -0800

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.

By: lemonfridge

lemonfridge — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:24:21 -0800

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!)