Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

This in and of itself isn't much of a revelation. Just ask their shareholders. But let me tell you just exactly WHY Google rocks so much.

When the .mobi top-level domain came into existence I thought it would be a great opportunity to snag a Gutenberg domain. A few days after they became public domain I did a few searches and managed to grab hold of gutenberg.mobi. Now, the .mobi domain puts restrictions on its usage, specifically that mobile friendly pages should be displayed. So, for the longest time i just had a barebones index.html. Well a few weeks ago I decided to move the domain to Google Apps for Domains. The move was painless, and I realized something exceptional in the process. If you build your website using the Google tools, it is made xhtml compliant, and thus formats itself for whatever your browser can handle. So www.gutenberg.mobi now renders one way in a full-blown desktop browser and another on a mobile device. And I didn't have to do a damn thing.

But this isn't the only reason they rock. Gmail is obviously mobile-friendly and has been for some time. But it seems that Blogger also has some friendiness built-in, as it renders pretty well on my Q. Displays as one column with the posts at the top and the side column info at the bottom.

But even THAT isn't why they rock. It's because even Picasa is mobile-friendly. And more than that. It's the seamlessness of it all. I was out earlier this evening and a friend wanted to see pictures of Mike, so I went to his blog. But I knew that he had removed his bearded pics from the front page and that I'd have to dig into his photo albums if I wanted to see the sea-farin' Captain Mike. Nonetheless, I decided to brave it on my Q. And what happened you might ask? I navigated his blog smoothly, found his photo album (House of Vain), and clicked it. To my surprise I was presented with a nice, minimalist page with a bunch of thumbnails and some navigation arrows. Moving around within the album was a breeze.

As I said earlier, it's the seamlessness that makes it so great. I didn't get some framed page that i had to navigate through to find the mobile-friendly link... it just worked. Web designers take heed - very soon, if your site DOESN'T do this, you will lose viewership. And don't even get me started on Flash-based sites.

I'll update the links in this post tomorrow sometime when I have a full-blown PC. My kingdom for a standalone mobile wysiwyg-y blog post editor. Google? You listening? :)