Create a mobile version of your site in seconds (Something for the Weekend #10)

This week’s ‘Something for the weekend’ is pretty straightforward: Mofuse is a service that instantly creates a mobile phone-friendly version of your site (or cellphone-friendly if you prefer). No registration required (although you’d be advised to) – you simply enter the URL of your site or RSS feed, and a stripped-down version is created, complete with .mobi extension.

What’s more, once created and registered, the site does some extra useful stuff:

• provides the code to allow you to embed a widget on your site which allows users to enter their phone number and receive a text with a link (presumably US only),
• mobile detection and redirection so people accessing your big old standard site via mobile phone will see the slimmed down version.
• It also provides analytics on visitor numbers, etc.
• You can customise colour and domain
• There is a mobile (and iphone) emulator so you can see how it looks on a mobile
• And there is even a comment feature where people can comment via mobile phone (they leave a number rather than an email)

The big problem, of course, is that you have no control over the advertising – the site will share revenue with you, but it’s through AdSense (you have to have an account to claim), and that doesn’t pay well. Also, mofuse itself seems a bit slow-loading at the moment, presumably through unexpected demand.

But let’s look at the upside.

All the service really does is detect the RSS feed and re-presents that. This then presents a number of other possibilities:

• You could create a mobile-friendly page for a site you want to access on the move but is normally clunky on your mobile
• You could aggregate some RSS feeds to create a bespoke mobile RSS reader (Here’s one I did for news about the news industry)
• You can do whatever you can do with RSS, providing a useful service on the move for your readers. (Suggestions in the comments please.)
• Most of all, YOU CAN DO IT QUICKLY. If something major happens, you can have a mobile site up and running in seconds (question 1: how easily could you create the RSS feed, however?). Imagine a specific news alert site following a disaster that people could access on the move. (question 2: how well could mofuse’s servers cope?)

If this is an area you’re interested in, it’s worth trying another service – Widsets - that does something similar (here’s one I created for the OJB a year or so ago)

And if you run a self-hosted blog on Wordpress, this plugin will auto-detect mobile phones and serve up a mobile-friendly version to them.

And finally, here are my delicious bookmarks for ‘mobile’

I’d love to know your thoughts and ideas.