Wap Review

Amit Agarwal's is one of India's most popular bloggers. His site,  Digital Inspiration,  is a technology blog covering software, gadgets and personal productivity.  The site also has many tips and tutorials on web development, increasing traffic and revenue and getting the most from popular software programs.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Webmove is a blog covering new free mashups and content on the web with an emphasis on free legal music.  Mobile view by Mobify

Personal blog of John Chow, publisher of gadget and tech deals blog TechZone. John shares tech, writing, "getting-things-done" and money making tips for bloggers and would be internet moguls. Mobile view by Mobify

The personal blog of Australian designer and photographer kristarella.  She writes about WordPress, graphics, web design, science, religion, blogging, computers, television, movies, music and  games. Mobile view by Mobify

Mobile front end to bit.ly a sophisticated URL shortener that is popular with Twitter.users. Displays a history of your shortened links and lets you create new ones.

This site, called "My How To Articles" describes itself simply as a database of how to articles.  It must be a bit of a puzzle to first time visitors.  The user interface consists of just a search box. No browsable categories, help, "About" or suggested searches.To find out what it's about I had to enter queries for random subjects until I got some results

My first guess was home improvement tips or MacGyverisms like how to fix a leaking car radiator leak using an egg, but queries like "fix faucet" and "duct tape" returned nothing.  Finally a search for "SQL" hit pay dirt.  The short pieces, which I'd describe as "tips" rather than "articles", seem to all cover Internet web technology with an emphases on server side web development using MySQL and PHP.

The articles are actually pretty good but the site would be a lot easier to use if it included a browsable directory of articles in addition to search.

Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

 

If you are at all interested web traffic statistics, or just want to see how your site is doing take a look at Dataopedia.  The site combines data, including charts and graphs, from Alexa, Quantcast, Compete, Google, Digg, Delicious, registrar records and other sources into to a single page packed with site metrics. It doesn't really tap into mobile traffic data sources and doesn't read .mobi registrar records so its more useful for analyzing desktop websites than mobile ones.

The mobile version of Dataopedia formats results into a single column and re-sized images for better mobile useability. The sheer quantity of data, number of images and lack of pagination brings the average page size of a site report to over 500 KB.  This makes the mobile version of Dataopedia only usable with full web mobile browsers. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory.

Qpyn Is a new short url service like TinyUrl.com except that it's mobile aware. The way it works is that you go to the Qpyn.com site and enter the URL you want to shorten. Qpyn gives you a "pyn" code. You can either create a short term Pyn which is 3 characters and lasts 24 hours or a 4-5 character pyn that lasts indefinitely. The long-term pyn for wapreview.com is 35p65. So if I wanted to send someone my url I could just send 35p65 by SMS, email, Twitter or paper and pencil. Wapreview.com is (I hope) pretty easy to remember, the real value of short urls is for sending those really long urls that some websites like the New York Times use. The recipient of a pyn can use it three different ways.

• Like a tiny url by sticking http://qpyn.com/go/? in front of it, for example, http://qpyn.com/go/?35p6. If you are using a mobile browser qPyn will automatically transcode the site to a more mobile friendly format. The transcoder is pretty good too, it splits large pages and resizes images.
• By entering the pyn at Qpyn.com to go to the original url.
• Entering the pyn at qPyn.mobi in a mobile browser.

Tiny urls have been making a comeback thanks to Twitter, and the mobile integration of qPyn plays off of that nicely. Qpyn suggests that you use the shorthand notation "qpyn.com[1ep27]" or "Q[1ep27]" when sharing links rather than the full URL. I can't see anyone doing that unless Qpyn becomes as well known as Twitter itself. Who would have any idea that "Q[1ep27]" means "Go to qpyn.com (or qpyn.mobi) and enter 1ep27"? If I have to explain all that I'd rather just say "http://qpyn.com/go/?1ep27".

More...

File sharing services like Rapidshare around since the dawn of the Internet. They let you anonymously upload a file that can then be downloaded by anyone with Web access.  While these services have gotten a bad name because they are widely used for illegal sharing of copyrighted material, they also make it possible for non-technical users to share self generated and legally sharable content like their own wedding videos without the need to install software or  resort to kludges like emailing multiple 10 MB attachments

However, none of the mainstream file sharing services are at all mobile friendly.  They are ad and subscription funded and interpose countdown timers, interstitials, deceptive links and various dirty tricks designed to get users to click on ads or pay to subscribe, which removes most of the impediments.

Enter Quick File Share Mobile (Qfs.mobi). a free mobile file hosting service with a clean mobile friendly interface, no timers and a minimum of ads.  It lets you upload, host and share files (up to 10MB) from your mobile phone.  Files can be downloaded by anyone or password protected.

After uploading a file you are given a unique download link and the option to share the link by SMS or Email. Files not downloaded within 30 days will be deleted.

You can upload from any phone whose browser supports the html input tag's "file" attribue (which enables browse for file functionality). Including the iPhone, Windows Mobile, most Nokias and Opera Mini, Bolt or UCWEB (on phones with JSR 75 support). Surprisingly, browse for file is not supported by any version of the Android browser.  A workaround for Android users is to use Opera Mini 4.2 but you would think a modern, open-source, smartphone operating system like Android would support such a basic html function.

I know that a lot of webmasters obsess over their site's Google PageRank. It's one of Google's measures (on a scale of 0 to 10) of a site's value. A higher PageRank is supposed to correlate with a high placing in search results and thus potentially greater ad revenue.

Google seems to be devaluing PageRank of late, removing it from Webmaster tools and publicly stating that it is only one of 200 signals that they use to rank sites and saying that PageRank is not useful to site owners.

Still, many site owners do track their PageRank and that of competitors sites. The only public source of PageRank from Google is via the Google Toolbar for Firefox and IE. Google has not published an API for retrieving PageRank, but there are apparently some undocumented APIs as dozens of sites offer PageRank lookup, alternate toolbars and Firefox extensions. Up to now none of these has been very mobile friendly. So Andres at the Mobility.mobi forum built a nice mobile friendly PageRank checker. It's at http://checkpr.mobi and seems to work very well with results that match the ones from Google Toolbar for the sites I've checked.

MFWS.ro "My Favorite Web Site" is the largest mobile friendly collection of web, SEO and mobile utilities I've found to date. 

There are some tools here that are hard to find on th mobile we including link checkers, ping, whois, traceroute, a page rank viewer, SEO keyword suggester, favicon maker, image re-sizer, video downloaders, a web based FTP client, MP3 cutter, an anonymizing proxy and a lot more.

When you get tired of the techy toys there's a small directory of better than average WAP games for your amusement.  Source: Mobility.mobi

Mobile web based FTP front end.  Manage your servers from any phone. Capabilities include upload, download, chmod and a text editor.  Could be handy but I worry about security.  It's not an HTTPS site and there is no privacy policy. Source Mobility.mobi

Mobile whois lookup.  Find details of any URL's domain registration just as owner's contact information, registrar, DNS servers and domain creation and expiration dates.  If the domain is a available, a buy link is displayed which leads to a non-mobile French language page.

Enter a url and it tells you what OS and Web Server the site is using

XML development articles. No longer updated

Slideshare, the site  where you can share and view PowerPoint presentations online in a web based viewer now has a mobile web version. 

It works pretty as long as you have the right mobile browser.  Slideshare is quite picky about what browsers it will play nice with.  The only supported browsers include the iPhone, Android G1, S60 Webkit, Mobile Internet Explorer and Opera Mini.  If you visit m.slideshare.com with any other mobile browser you will only see a static page advising you to use Opera Mini or Yahoo Go!  with no way to get to the Slideshare content.  Which seems overly restrictive. The site's pages aren't that big, only 30-45 KB.  There's a little JavaScript but the site works with JavaScript turned off.

The problem with requiring Mini or Go is that a lot of phones on North American operators can't use them.  Verizon and US Cellular feature phones don't support Java apps like Opera Mini and Yahoo Go and T-Mobile USA blocks third party apps from connecting to the web. Yet many phones on these networks have Netfront or Teleca browsers that I'm pretty sure could display Slideshare Mobile. It's great to recommend Opera Mini and Go but Slideshare needs to add a "Try to use Slideshare with your current browser..." link. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Feb-2010: Site is returnibng "We have run into a problem processing your last request! Please try again later. (Error Code: 403)"