Music and your brain 

Wired interview with a McGill professor on music and your brain. I think I'll get the book. I wonder if he has anything to say about getting chills.

OK, OK, grumble, grumble, I'm being dragged along  

My first reaction to Dave's new mobile news work was "That's not new." But he's gone and done what he always does -- drags along the cats on leashes, like me, until we give up and decide it might be a smarter move to walk along with him. All the talk about it has prompted one of the reactions his evangelism intended. It caused me to remember I should be thinking about how the mobile user base is growing, and I've forced myself to resurrect a mobile version of a newsletter I'd put on the back burner for months. Thanks, buddy (you wise frustrating nag ;-) ;-) ).

I'm working at home at least for the morning while my car is in the shop, so maybe I'll narrate some of the issues I've run into in trying to render a mobile edition of the e-mail newsletter in the Expression Engine content management system.

Trials: long URLs 

I haven't been able to check the latest version of my mobile newsletter, because the only device I have to check it with (besides emulators) is my fairly unsmart Siemens S66 with Cingular's MEdiaNet service. MEdiaNet has been down all morning.

I did get the index page to work yesterday on my phone, but ran into trouble with the story page. I think the problem might have been the length of the URL to the items. The link type I was using in Expression Engine (EE) output the whole title of the item as part of the URL, and that would make it too long for some mobile services. I changed it to reference an entry ID, and I'll be interested to see if that makes a difference.

Trials: tables and graphics 

Of course, because I'm impetuous and reckless and can't stand to use the change-one-thing-at-a-time scientific method, I changed a bunch of things when my story page didn't work, and promptly caused the index page not to work either.

So yesterday at work, I fiddled with the cosmetics in various emulators, learned a few things, and came to some mobile newbie conclusions.

I'd read on some mobile design tutorial that a single-celled table was a good thing. It isn't. Having all the content in a table caused the right part of the page to get lopped off if the graphic was too wide for the screen. It's only itty-bitty, but still too wide for some phone screens.

Sometimes you just have to decide things for people, and yesterday I set a limit on catering to everybody. I decided people who use a phone to look at a web page have no business trying to do it if their screen is less than 120 pixels wide. Is that arrogant? Probably.

Trials: character sets 

I wondered if specifying character sets might be throwing things off, and noticed that neither Dave's nor Kevin Burton's mobile source specified, so I took it out of the standard EE template, and borrowed a couple other things from Kevin's mobile TailRank source, which is also very stripped down like Dave's, though it does use CSS.

Still can't test anything. Let me know if you've tried the News Alert mobile page and tell me how it looks, or if you can see anything at all, and what you're using to read it? Thanks.

Whoa! Holy timemachine, Mr. Peabody! 

I just refreshed my blog's index page and it's showing April 8, 2006 as the latest post.

All better now.