My first mobile site, in Drupal of course

Guaka — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 20:58:12 +0000

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In 2008 I built my first Drupal site, for a furniture business. The site proved to be a big success and we started some other furniture sites as well later on. I also worked on many other Drupal sites and the web in general hasn't been standing still. So last year we decided it was time for an upgrade. Not as easy as thought with a site that is ranking extremely well for a wide range of keywords. It also appeared more difficult to get to a new design.

I moved the entire teakdump site to teakmeubelen.nl, which is super easy with Aegir, added the new theme, and many of the custom modules I had developed for the new Meubels website. With that most of the site was ready except for some settings that weren't easy to grab in code.

As early adopters of technology (especially within the furniture world) we'd also been entertaining the thought of having a site that works well on mobile phones. I had already seen and heard of Mobile Tools, so I gave it a quick try.

The Drupal modules

I was pleasantly surprised by the integration with Display Suite and Context. That plus the Fusion Mobile theme gave me fairly decent mobile site in a very short time.

The mobile build mode make it a snap to get a slightly more usable rendering of nodes on mobile devices and the mobile context makes it easy to quickly rearrange the entire site for mobile devices.

I noticed an issue though: the Display Suite build mode was showing on the desktop site! I had to disable Mobile Tools and look back into this the next day.

Then I checked WURFL but that seemed to just complicate matters a bit more.

As it seems now there was a little bug in the code that sets the build mode, at least I wrote a patch for the Mobile Tools that works very well for me!

The main other thing I ran into was the caching of the theme. I'm using two different themes, one for the desktop version and one for the mobile version of the site. This doesn't work at all if you have the same URLs. So finally I had to take the redirect out of Aegir and into my nginx configuration so that m.teakmeubelen.nl also points to the same install (without a redirect).

SEO

From blog posts I gathered that Google doesn't seem to consider the same content on both desktop and mobile URLs as punishable duplicate content. I just wonder how Google is supposed to detect the mobile URLs (which is one more reason for a nice blog post about my first mobile site).

Now things still need some work here and there but overall I think this site looks great, both on the desktop and on mobiles. And I wonder where to put the iPad and other tablets, as I think the desktop site is just fine on an iPad but Mobile Tools probably considers it mobile hardware anyway.

Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years

Guaka — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 01:22:59 +0000

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It always makes me happy to hear from Joe. He wrote something new: How mobile phones can replace a broken economy: The Mobile Manifesto:

When we talk about trouble with the economy, we’ve been overlooking an astounding opportunity. Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years. If you care about the planet, if you care about your kids, if you care about other people, this is something to pay attention to.

While we continue to argue about capitalism and socialism, for the first time a third option is really possible. We can build a more sophisticated, dynamic, distributed approach to organizing labor and resources than has ever been attempted before.

It's bold and sensible. It has made sense for the past couple of years, when it became clear to me that the deeper ideas behind the sharing of free software and free information are applicable to the real world, the real economy. It was no wonder I met Joe 2 years ago at the CouchSurfing Collective in New Zealand; it was amazing experience to work with him. His analysis of modern life is razor sharp and combined with his desire for change we could start seeing "actual people, in vicinity to one another, thinking about each others’ needs, and helping each other, in person and on the ground".

Unlike existing networks based on short messaging (twitter, broadtexter, brightkite, etc), Groundcrew focuses on finding and coordinating like-minded strangers rather than friends. Groups form based on common beliefs, needs, and interests. Broad groups exist for those interested in good deeds, adventures, exchanges, and more. Another differentiating factor is that Groundcrew aggregates information about members’ immediate availability for action, together with agents’ passions and dreams. This is opposed to other services (twitter, facebook) which work more generally with status updates and feeds.

Guaka! - mobile

My first mobile site, in Drupal of course

tag:

The Drupal modules

SEO

Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years

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