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.

Cell phones have long had the ability to display content from the internet, but it wasn’t until the iPhone that surfing from a phone became a viable alternative to desktop browsing. Consider how quickly the iPhone became the top mobile browser in terms of traffic despite having only 2 percent of the mobile market! Now that the iPhone is in its 3rd generation and market share has steadily risen to 17% of all smart phones, it easily beats all competition for mobile web traffic. Put simply, compared to other smart phones iPhone users actually use their phones to surf the internet. While firm numbers are hard to come by, it is safe to assume that the majority of mobile web browser traffic coming to your website will be coming from the iPhone.

While Phone Feedr will work best on the iPhone, we expect the compatibilty of our Feedrs to steadily improve as mobile web browsing matures. With the iPhone as an indication of the impending mobile browser revolution, Phone Feedr will always strive for compatibility with as many phones as possible.

I will end this post with an invitation for you to comment about Phone Feedr and how it works on different mobile browsers. It is almost impossible to test our site on all the phones available. Please use this post as a place to point out flaws in our system and suggest improvements. Thanks for your feedback!

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

3. Click on “Users” in the upper right of the page. Then click on “your profile.”

4. At the bottom of this page you will see a section that says “Profile Picture.” Click “Choose File” and then find the icon you created in step 1. Click “Update Profile” and your icon will be uploaded and saved.

5. You are done. From your iPhone or iPod touch, navigate to your feedr and hit the “+” at the bottom of your screen. Touch “Add to Home Screen” and then your icon should appear next to the title of the page. 

Pretty simple, right? For the code monkeys out there, you might be interested in the actual code that makes this work. We got you covered. This is made possible by a javascript that looks like this:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://path_to_your_icon.png" />

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!

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!