The Next Web

Make your blog iPhone compatible with these luscious plugins

Written on August 15, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

You better face it: with millions of iPhones flying over counters world-wide, more and more of your visitors will read your blog on the shiny object. On this blog for example, already 2 percent of the visitors does. So it might be time to consider making your blog iPhone compatible. Especially now the crappy plugins are replaced with cool tools which have that “OMG-it’s-so-shiny”-flavor.

You’ll need two plugins: the WPtouch iPhone Theme and Yoast’s Blog Icons. Before we continue, please mind the iPhoney. This nifty tool shows you how your blogs would look on an iPhone.

WPtouch iPhone Theme

Bravenewcode isn’t the first one to develop an iPhone template, but definitely the first one who does a good job. While other versions depicted a rather boring lay-out, WPtouch does have that shiny feeling all over it. Moreover, there’s an option to switch to a normal view, which is something some iPhone users asked us to offer when had an old iPhone theme running. Mostly because they were using a wireless Internet connection.

After uploading the theme, there’s an admin panel available to play around with. For example, there’s the possibility to specify the icons per page or post. It’s also possible to switch off some of the fancy features - mostly Ajax-based - to make your blog for more accessible EDGE and 3G connections. I won’t do it, as I already save these users a lot of time by cutting away the heavy images.

If you don’t feel like installing an iPhone theme, then at least make sure you insert one important line of code that specifies the width of your blog.

Blog icons

So now you’ve taken care of ALL your visitors. But you might want to give your fans something extra, right? Well, Joost de Valk takes care of that with his latest plugin. Based on an idea of my co-editor Boris, he wrote a Wordpress plugin called Blog Icons. It allows you to upload a favicon, rss image, and…, an iPhone icon - the one you see when adding a bookmark to your start screen. So when somebody decides to make your blog available with one click, it will look pretty damn good.

(more resources here)

I hope you like that post!

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blog, blog icons, favicon, iphone, shiny object, wordpress, wordpress themes, wptouch