Calling All Phones

As we continue to improve Phone Feedr I think it is important to start a conversation about mobile web browsers and how your Feedr will work on the multitude of phones on the market right now. Mobile browsers are on the verge of an explosion, with the iPhone setting the pace. The iPhone’s web browser has set the bar extremely high for mobile web browsers and the competition is ambitiously striving to catch up. That is great news because it means that browsing the web from your phone is going to continue to become a more enjoyable experience. (more…)

Custom Icons for the iPhone

One of the really cool things about the iPhone and iPod touch is that you can create custom icons for the home screen. Whenever a person adds a bookmark to your website to their home screen, the iPhone or iPod touch will look for an icon. Since most sites don’t have the code needed to tell the iPhone where to look for this icon, a default icon is created. 

If you create a feedr we have made it really simple for you to create your own custom icon. By default you will get the blue feedr logo as your icon, but if you want to personalize the icon follow these steps.

1. Create your icon. The icon’s actual size is 57×57 pixels, but you can make it a little bigger and Phone Feedr will size it for you automatically. I found that creating an icon at 150×150 pixels worked well. Save your icon as a jpg.

2. Log in to your Phone Feedr account

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Introducing Pie.ui

We just added a bundle to the tools page called Pie.ui. Since Phone Feedr owes so much to open source projects, it seems only right that we offer our humble contributions for you to use and improve. Pie.ui is perfect for anyone who wants to create an iPhone optimized version of their website but don’t want it to be hosted on Phone Feedr. Pie.ui is a hybrid of SimplePie and iUI. You can learn all about Pie.ui here.

Redirect your iPhones to Phone Feedr

Once you set up your Phone Feedr, you might want to consider redirecting iPhone visitors to your Phone Feedr. Here is a script that will detect iPhone visitors and redirect them to your feedr:

Replace the “http://yourfeedr.phonefeedr.com” with the address of your feedr and insert the code above the of your website’s homepage. Be careful which pages you put this code on. It makes sense to redirect people from your homepage, but not from the other pages of your site. Since a feedr is supposed to send traffic to your site, you don’t want to create a loop between your site and your feedr. For example, if you click on a link in your feedr that sends visitors to a page where you have the redirect to the feedr then they are going to be going in circles. So play it safe and just redirect people from your homepage.

Thanks to ebaspace.com for the handy redirect script!

Welcome to Phone Feedr!

Welcome to Phonefeedr.com! This is the first post in the Phone Feedr blog and I want to use it to introduce the site and tell you some of the plans we have for it. The goal of Phone Feedr is to offer a simple way for anyone to make a phone-friendly version of their website. Basically, it will pull content from your website’s RSS feed and format it for mobile devices. We are targeting the iPhone particularly, but Phone Feedr should be compatible with any phone with a web browser. 

The optimized version of your website is what we call your “feedr.” It will be hosted as a subdomain of phonefeedr.com. In other words, you will have your own address that will look like your-site-name.phonefeedr.com. Once your feedr is created all that is left to do is start promoting it on your website. You can even direct phones automatically to your feedr by adding some code to your site. Watch the tools page for more info on how to do that.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more features and announcements!