Mobilize your website

I just got access to a new beta site that is attempting to do for mobile sites for what Feedburner did for RSS feeds. The site is called Mobile Fusion, or MoFuse for short. It only takes a few minutes to setup. Once you login, you create a mobile site, which is done by pointing MoFuse to your site’s RSS feed. I run my RSS feed through FeedBurner, and it had no problem at all reading the feed. MoFuse then creates a new feed that is applicable to mobile browsers.

The new feed is stripped down to the bare minimum, removing all the pictures, flash, and anything else you had on your site that doesn’t easily translate to a mobile browser. Once that’s done, you can create up to 2 other (correction: you can create more than 3 pages with MoFuse) additional pages for your mobile feed, which MoFuse suggests that you use for a “Contact Us” page or a “About Us” page. You create these pages right inside your MoFuse account and it allows the use of some HTML mark ups. Me being the lazy bum that I am, opted not to create any additional pages. The another option that you have is turning on Google AdSense on your site.

If you do turn it on, you can select to put the banner at the top of your page or the bottom and you must agree to split half the revenue with MoFuse. You enter your Google AdSense account ID and MoFuse randomly serves half the ad impressions with your Google AdSense ID and the other half with their own AdSense ID. I think this is a great idea and compromise, especially since MoFuse is providing a free service. The last feature you can add is a bit of code (which MoFuse autogenerates for you, specifically for your blog software) that autodirects mobile browsers to your MoFusion mobile feed. I was afraid that the code wouldn’t properly detect some browsers and accidentally deliver the wrong content, so I decided not to use this code. Instead, I included a mobile badge button, so that those users who want to actually see the full site on a mobile browser can do it, as long as they don’t mind waiting for that initial page to load up on their cell phone.

Check out my mobile website here

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