Month: July 2007

Upgrading One Digital Life

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A while back I wrote about how I had plans for this site that would involve changing the format a bit. Tonight I took the first (baby) step towards that goal. I updated my ancient install of WordPress to the current version (2.2.1).

You may have noticed that the site looks a fair amount different now too. This theme isn’t actually one that I made. It’s called Blog oh Blog, by Bob Jiwakacau. Although I’ve said it before, at some point I actually will make my own theme, but in the meantime I needed to ditch the one that I had been using. It was so old, and had so much legacy junk in it that it was basically being held together with duct tape and rubber bands. I didn’t think it could hold up to upgrading WordPress (and I was just sick of looking at it). Although this theme is quite a bit different than anything I’ve used before, I like it (with a little tweaking).

Free Newsgator Mobile for iPhone

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I use NetNewsWire for all my RSS reading goodness. NetNewsWire is capable of syncing my feeds between multiple computers either via .Mac or Newsgator. I’ve always used .Mac, because the online Newsgator interface has always seemed a bit clunky to me, so I didn’t really use it.

That practice is changing today, because Newsgator has released a free version of it’s online reader formatted for the iPhone.

“The login automatically detects the iPhone. If discovered, the iPhone is routed to a version of NewsGator’s free Mobile service designed specifically to work with the iPhone, and enables users to read news feeds and mark feeds as read while they’re on the go.”

via Macworld

Dynamically reformat your WordPress blog for the iPhone

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If you run a WordPress blog, you can easily optimize your site for the iPhone with a handy plugin called, iWPhone.

The plugin automatically detects if the visitor is on an iPhone, and dynamically reformats the content to best fit the smaller screen.

Keep in mind that this is an early beta release of the plugin, so you should expect some bugs. I browsed a few sites that are running it, and everything seem to work fine. I haven’t tried it here yet, as I’m running an older copy of WordPress. The plugin developers have only tested the plugin on WP 2.2.1

On one hand, I think this is a very cool plugin. But on the other, a big part of the “wow factor” of browsing the internet on an iPhone is it’s the “real” internet, and not some slimmed-down, mobile version of the internet. This plugin kind of goes against that. I’m personally hoping that the developers build in an option screen to allow the viewer to choose which version they want.

.Mac email aliases don’t really work on the iPhone

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This probably won’t matter to most people out there, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

If you use aliases with your .Mac account, and you have an iPhone, be careful who you reply to. An email sent to your .Mac alias can be received just fine on your iPhone, but if you reply from your iPhone, your REAL .Mac address will be used. The iPhone can’t send from your alias, like your desktop app can.

Hopefully this will be fixed in a future software update.