I did a similar work to yesterday’s Digg Mobile script and so I created a mobile version for the gadget web site I occassionally write for, TuxTops: www.TuxTops.com/pda/ . Check screenshots below.

I also decided to make the script and design that makes all that possible available to the world and give it a name: “MobileQuo” is a quick and dirty script that helps you mobilize your web site or blog, or mobilize other people’s news sites & blogs. It uses as input an RSS 2.0 feed (no other kinds of newsfeeds will work) and then creates a simple cHTML web site that renders well on most mobile gadgets (cellphones, PDAs etc). Installation is very easy but this version of the script only allows 10 news items to display in a single page. Email me if you need a multi-page mobile page that can parse more news items. cHTML is a subset of HTML 3.2 and it’s generally much more compatible with the majority of mobile devices than XHTML/CSS is.

So, download it and use it for your own purposes! Leave a comment in this blog post if you would like to share a URL that uses that script.

Update: Now OSNews has such a rendered RSS page too: http://osnews.com/pda

Pocket IE

Nokia WebKit

PalmOS Blazer (Costin, thx for the pic)

Openwave 7.0

Madagascar, the movie, ain’t a fantastic movie. It has its moments, but it is not as top notch, as let’s say, Shrek 1 is. Nevertheless, I totally identify with one of its characters, Mort.

As I wrote yesterday, I don’t understand why people buy Motorola feature phones. The latest blunder in their MiB browser is the fact that if you have a <center> attribute, it won’t take into account any tables in it. From the validation HTML point of view, this makes sense. Problem is, in practice legacy wins over validation rules. Other browsers don’t support DIV alignments and so the old, now deprecatted, <center> attribute is the only way out to be compatible across the board.

Anyways, I went on and fixed that, just to do the favor to MiB. But when the <center> attribute was removed and the table was finally rendered as requested by the code, a new problem arose. It seems that the engineers who configure the Motorola 176×220 phones leave the browser font settings to be the same as the ones in their 240×320 phones. This means that the font size used by default on 176×220 phones is huge! Even the softbuttons (which usually use big fonts) have smaller font size than the in-browser font!

So, which version do I leave on? The ugly, fading, “oh, I am dying” version, or the “look how big I am, I am going to eat you” version? With Motorola, you always have to pick your poison.

As always, many thanks to Michael from MobileBurn for taking the time testing this for me.

Digg is these days one of the most popular techie blog sites, and most people love it. Problem is, it has no mobile version. There were 4-5 earlier efforts by fans to create a mobile interface to Digg, but their creations don’t work or look great on most mobile browsers.

This is why I decided to create a new mobile interface, and make sure it works with all cHTML-capable mobile browsers:

http://MoBits.com/digg/

The content is based on the main Digg RSS feed and so the story links drive you back to Digg.com instead of the actual article. I spent the whole evening testing it with 11 different mobile browsers: PocketIE, Netfront, SonyEricsson’s SEC, Motorola MiB, Openwave, Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, Blackberry, Nokia S40, Nokia S60, AvantGo. I am sure the page works fine with other browsers too, like Obigo, Blazer, Sunrise/JPluck/iSilo, Unix text mode browsers, Sidekick, Sony PSP and more. In any case, let me know if rendering is under-par on your browser, send me a picture too if possible.

My implementation features 4 pages, with 10 digg posts on each page. On average each of these pages is between 7 and 8 KB (so when applicable, GPRS charges are kept really low).

Here are screenshots on some of the most popular mobile browsers. Send me via email yours too if your browser is not shown below!

Also, please digg this announcement to let more users know of this free service. Finally, the PHP source code that generates this layout is now available.

Nokia S60 WebKit-based browser

Openwave 7.x

Motorola MiB 2.2.x

Nokia S40

Opera Mobile

Pocket IE

Blackberry (with HTML features enabled)

Opera Mini 2.0.4459

Netfront on a VGA PDA

Web Pro 3.5 on a Tungsten T3 (courtecy of TamsPalm)

Teleca Obigo (courtecy of Göran Svennarp)