Mowser.com<\/a> is Russell Beattie’s<\/a> latest mobile site. It combines search, a transcoder and a mobile site directory with over 500 links, a directory of over 2000 feeds, chat room, forum and Russ’ new blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Mobile transcoders have not been too popular<\/a> with webmasters and content providers<\/a> but Mowser is attempting to change that by giving site owners unprecedented control over how their transcoded site looks in Mouser. By adding a few meta tags (see the Mowser blog for details<\/a>) to your site you can:<\/p>\n
Another nice touch is that if Mowser detects a true mobile site it shows it unaltered – something I wish Google and Skweezer’s transcoders did.<\/p>\n
Mowser also detects if your are using Opera Mini or Opera Mobile and sends un-transcoded pages to those browsers. This is something that I wish Google Reader Mobile, which automatically transcodes outgoing links, would do. Opera, especially Mini, does a much better job of reformatting and resizing pages than any transcoder. When using a good full web browser like Netfront, Webkit or Opera the transcoder actually makes the experience worse by removing styling, breaking pages into smaller chunks than needed and increasing latency.<\/p>\n
All in all I’m very impressed with Mowser. It’s a brand new site and while it has a few issues with encoding special characters and page size, I think it’s already an ideal place to call your mobile home. Give it a try and be sure and let Russ know what is and isn’t working for you.<\/p>\n
Features: Usability:
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Mowser.com is Russell Beattie’s latest mobile site. It combines search, a transcoder and a mobile site directory with over 500 links, a directory of over 2000 feeds, chat room, forum and Russ’ new blog. It’s an impressive mobile portal. In brief testing the transcoder worked well. The search results are high quality, I tried to figure out which major search engine Mowser is using by trying the same queries in Mowser, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. It looks like it’s … Continue reading