Blogging for the iPhone

by | Friday, August 08, 2008

I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn’t morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface. But for every technological problem, there exists a technological solution (and vice versa)…

A quick bout with Google led me to iWphone a WordPress plugin and theme that “automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. It detects the iPhone/iPod touch’s User Agent and serves up the content with the special theme only to iPhone and iPod touch visitors, all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme.” Is that cool or what?

Now as I was doing this I didn’t have my iTouch handy so I couldn’t test it. I didn’t know just how well this was working or if it was even working at all. That is when I discovered iPhoney: “a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone.” In others words a “virtual iPhone.”

So a quick download later, I was seeing what this site looks like on an iPhone… and I must say it looks much better. So now my website is iPhone (and iTouch) compatible! Not bad for 3 minutes of Google searching and 5 minutes of uploading and testing! I am so impressed by WordPress…

Now if I could get some people to read this blog, all this effort would be worth it 🙂

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Bangalore symposium, now on YouTube

This past August I was in India for a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity. The meeting was organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International Youth Foundation and was "designed to bring together education and...

There is no app for that

Ideas.TED.com has a new article titled—There's no app for good teaching: 8 ways to think about tech in ways that actually improve the classroom. It quotes a bunch of scholars and researchers, one of whom is yours truly. I am just posting this, for the record. Image...

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

My Good-Evil oscillation ambigram design is easily one of my most popular designs - having made it to multiple publications, websites, covers of magazines, on the TV Show Brain Games... and now it has made its way into a medical research journal Frontiers of...

The futures of higher ed with Phoebe Wagner

The futures of higher ed with Phoebe Wagner

The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU runs a series of short stories and virtual gatherings that explore issues related to transformative change. Essentially they solicit and publish a (super-short) short story that explores “themes of community,...

Mirror, mirror

Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass? A recent article in the NYTimes (Mirrors...

Creativity is greatly valued: A poem

Creativity is greatly valued: A poem

Creativity is greatly valuedCreativity is greatly valued For his sharpness His ability to look beyond The surface   And willingness to Give it a shotTo break Out of the box The cubicle   And jump   When the towers burnt   Who knew Box cutters Had...

21st Century Learning, one school’s ongoing story

Recently I had been invited to the Birmingham School District to speak to the administrators, teachers and broader community about their recent initiatives on 21st Century Learning. I had a wonderful visit - which I was reminded of by this article (On the Front Lines...

From incompetence to mastery, the stages

One who knows and knows he knows is a wise man, Follow Him One who knows and knows not he knows is asleep, Awaken him One who knows not and knows he knows not is a child, Teach him One who knows not and knows not he knows not is a Fool, Avoid him. -- Attributed...

Who wrote this poem?

Back when I was a graduate student I got bitten by the bug of palindromic poetry - poems that read the same when read backwards. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. I had posted them on the web a while ago and there...

3 Comments

  1. Hemant Mendiratta

    Thanks for sharing such a useful information. Helpful for a blogger like me. Will use the same plugin for my website and see if it helps. Thanks!

    Reply
  2. Halil Ibrahim BULBUL

    I think upto now Iphone made many usefull ways working with wordpress. fortunatelly. Thanks for sharing your idea.

    Reply
  3. Greg Casperson

    Great find. I know playing with my iTouch, it really helps if a site has an iphone enabled version. Now I just need more time to play with it plus get ready for classes in two weeks!

    I don’t know about you, but sure wish my iTouch was an iPhone so I didn’t have to carry both, but suppose can’t complain about free gifts to students from Apple–a nice way to lure us in I suppose 😀

    Reply

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