I mentioned the other day that I had “mobilised” this website, so it appears appropriately on, well, mobile phones. The plugin I used in this case is WordPress Mobile Plugin.

However, it’s since occured to me that the ability to actually write entries on my mobile might be handy too (particularly as I now have my Bluetooth keyboard) - the aforementioned plugin doesn’t add that functionality. Some scratching around this morning (including a plugin that simply wouldn’t activate because it caused a “fatal error”) I found something called WPhone Admin Plugin. This works a treat, although it renders it in a very simple wap-style format (which is weird, but according to their forums appears to be the case on the N95).

However, I also tried something called, grandly, “WordPress Ultimate Gamer’s Pack“. It’s supposed to display your page more appropriate on portable devices - specifically the Nintendo DS, Wii and Sony PSP. I activated it and tried it on my Wii… database error. Can’t be good. Deactivated it and all is now well. Hmm.

This mobile malarkey isn’t as simple as you’d think, is it?

Both yesterday and today I’ve been having a bit of a play with applications for the N95 as well as internet access via the phone.

First all, it’s REALLY easy to convert a Wordpress blog like this into a mobile application. The free WordPress Mobile plugin is rather good. It comes with a plug at the bottom for the author, plus 50% of any advertising revenue goes to them too - unless you pay a one-off fee of £25. As I don’t advertise, this isn’t an issue

So, if you now visit my site via your mobile phone you’ll find it display as appropriate for that format.

The screenshot of this is to the right and was created by a very simple free Symbian app.

Now, whilst playing with the aforementioned Mobile plugin, I noticed that they offered a QR barcode to add to each page - scanned by an appropriate mobile phone or PDA, this would link back to the URL of the page. Now, I’d noticed the barcode scanner function on my phone but couldn’t see the use.

Instead of adding one for each page, I’ve instead put one in this blogs sidebar - scan that on your mobile phone and it will give you the general URL of the site - far quicker than typing it in! I can see other uses for this (it can hold all sorts of information, not just URL’s) and I’ve already seen it used in magazine adverts.

There are a number of a QR code generators on the internet, so there’s really no excuse not to dabble!

N95 application wise, I’m also trying out the Nokia Step Counter (yes, yes, I know). What I’m really excited about, though, are a number of apps by a chap named Samir - at the moment they’re all in a closed beta, but he intends to make them freeware once complete. These includes utilities to perform actions if the phone is turned over or shook (I love the idea of turning the phone over at night and it automatically going into a silent profile!).

Lastly, I’ve recently taken delivery of an ultra-slim Bluetooth keyboard, made by iGo. It’s superb and a really good price too - less than half the price of most others. Now, ignoring the fact that they’d decided to put a sticker on it running from front to back, and not one that easily comes off, or the fact that the manual that comes with it is next to useless, it’d heartily recommend it.

However, there are no N95 drivers for it, so you have to use those that are available for the N73. I contacted iGo to find out when they might be available and it would appear that they never will be as the keyboard is no longer being made. So snap them up whilst they’re cheap! And still available!

Streamline are officially rubbish. The BMTG site was a combination of slow or inoperative for about a week and all I got was messages that engineers were looking at it. Oh, and I couldn’t access the MySQL tables.

Thankfully, I use MySQL Tools to create regular backups on my home PC, so I used some of those to rebuild the tables at Memset. I also decided to rush out the version of the website that I was working on - I’m still testing this now even though it’s been live for a number of days.

The hard bit came when I found that Memset don’t allow domain transfers. Rather than keep the domain at Streamline, I decided to move it to 1&1. Their prices are also remarkable cheap. So, I moved the IPS TAG from Streamline to 1&1 (whilst still keeping the DNS pointing to Streamline). When that was done, I simply updated the DNS at 1&1 to Memset. If there was any downtime during all of this, it wasn’t very long at all.

And Memset hosting really flies… far better than it was ever at Streamline. In a word - “superb”. And free for charity hosting.

Before closing down the account at Streamline I asked, because of the issues we’d had, whether they’d consider (especially as this was a charity not-for-profit) refunding part of the remaining hosting fees. They ignored this request and simply closed it down. Nice.

I still have Artiss.co.uk (including this blog) hosted by Streamline, because I paid for 2 years hosting back in December. Unless anyone wants to donate some money, I can’t justify moving right now. Ironically, I wrote this blog offline a couple of days ago but have been unable to upload it due to my blog being down. Thanks to Streamline.

I’ve finally got around to upgrading my blog to version 2.5 of Wordpress. Their site recommended I install a maintnenace mode plugin before commencing - it would let visitors know why the site was down. A good recommendation I though. I installed it and activated it. I then did the upgrade. Going to my site displayed the maintenance message… trying to go into admin displayed the maintenance message… in fact I couldn’t do anything but display the message. Arrgghhh. Thankfully deleting the plugin sorted that out.

And apart from that slight panic, all went reasonably well. Haven’t yet explored all the new features but the admin screens all look a lot funkier.

After much playing with various WordPress plug-ins, I’ve settled on a final 12, all of which are active and in use. Out of interest, here are details on them…

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it and can review the spam it catches.

Contact Form 7
A flexible contact form generator

Easy Gravatars
Add Gravatars to your comments.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Hot Linked Image Cacher
Goes through your posts and gives you the option to cache some or all hotlinked images locally. This was useful after I moved from Blogger to WordPress, as many images were hotlinking to Blogger and/or Picasa.

I Love Social Bookmarking
I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons. I’ve modified this myself, with a new icon.

Last Viewed Posts  
Show a list of posts (and pages) the visitor had recently viewed. It’s cookie based. Every visitor has his own listing. This is not a global output for all users!

Lightbox JS 
Used to overlay images on the current page. Can be used seperately, but also used by WP Picasa LightBox.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module to help speed up your WordPress blog.

WP Picasa LightBox 
This plugin allows you to easily add your Picasa photos to your posts.

WP YouTube
WP YouTube allows you to easily add YouTube videos to your posts.