Mobilize any Website with Mowser

Mowser - Logo The mobile web is really taking off. There are a ton of startups exploiting this very market, and it’s only going to get more and more competitive.

With lots of mobile users in the US, unlimited internet and wi-fi enabled phones; browsing the web can be quite the experience. If you don’t have Opera on your phone, chances are you’re using a crappy built-in browser that rarely, if ever, renders pages correctly. That’s where Mowser steps in.

By mobilizing web content, Mowser delivers perfect pages for your phone of popular websites. While you can input any web address in there and Mowser will do a fairly good job of converting it, my experience with it is that if you type in RSS feeds of websites, you’ll get a much better return.

As you can see above, the one on the top is browsing MakeUseOf Feedburner feed, while the one on the bottomght is viewing MakeUseOf website. It doesn’t take much more than a quick glance to figure out which one makes for the more mobile friendly site! Also, all the links clicked from within the Mowser site will also be mobilized. Bonus!

Mowser has also added other features that might interest you. As you saw from the home page screen shot above, they also offer topics such as subscribing to popular tag feeds, free games, mobile directory, the tech 100 (powered by TechMeme’s top 100 technology blogs), top 100 politics, and the top 100 search engines made easy by using keywords directly into the site.

Do you have any thoughts about better web page mobilizers out there? Share them with us!

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

Tagged: browser tips • mobile tips • website mobilizer

Travis Quinnelly

Computers have become more than just a hobby. I work as a â€œNetwork Engineerâ€ for a major Health System from 8-5 and I also work for a small-giants media, web design and development company in my spare time focusing on Web Standards and hacking to death the amazingly brilliant WordPress application.

http://www.passingnotes.com dave

well, i tried the mowser wordpress plugin earlier this week and was very upset. what they do not tell you: the standard configuration of the plugin works like this: simple, you just click to enable, it automatically sniffs phones, redirects to mowser.

BUT here’s what actually happens: instead of your url as landing page, what user actually sees is a big mowser text item with a note about being ad supporte and a full page of ads, at the bottom of the screen is the option to continue to the site – once in the site, the experience is nice BUT if you click a title link in a blog item, you are again brought to the ad screen, all ads, identical display as landing page, at bottom is another link to continue to post…they insert ads at front and in between every item.

***that is an awful user experience** people are not going to click ads on mobile phones, and with limited real estate on the screen, it’s a sorry approach to ‘generating revenue’

the would do better sticking with the “automatically serve your adsense if detected” (which it does) and suggest a revenue share arrangement and NOT touch the flow of content!!!

i removed it within about five minues.

http://makeuseof.com Aibek

I looked for plugin on their website but couldn’t find it. Are you sure this plugin is from Mowser ?
http://www.tquizzle.com Travis Quinnelly

@dave
I couldn’t find the Mowser WP plugin either.

You’re right on the ads, Mowser does drop an ad or two in there occasionally…or when you click the link for the full article for sites who only display a teaser in their feed, you’ll get a full page where you can click the link at the very bottom to go to the site.
Mowser’s got to make money, but at least its not pushing ads to every single page you visit.
http://whatareyouwatching.uni.cc?x=1 Television SPy

The odd part about that is that their monetization of the system doesn’t lead to any profit for the actual content developer. So they slap their ads on your content, kinda seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Personally I don’t mind letting users view my content on whatever device they want – but I think some of the bigwig publishers and bloggers may not like that.

http://www.instantfundas.com kaushik

This is better. Replace [your site] with the URL of the site

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2FYOUR URL]&hl=en&mrestrict=xhtml

http://www.tquizzle.com Travis Quinnelly

better is relative.

http://mowser.com Mike Rowehl

Hey folks,

Sorry you had such a bad experience Dave, we fool around with different advertising setups for Mowser, and you happened to hit something that didn’t work out so well. We don’t throw up a set of ads on every inbound request, and we’re trying to figure out configurations for the site that don’t include as much that gets in the way of the user. It’s a pretty thorny problem though.

As far as the WordPress Plugin, it’s actually up on the wordpress.org site:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mowser-wordpress-mobile/

And there’s a bunch of info about using Mowser with other publishing systems on the publisher wiki:

http://pub.mowser.com

- Mike
http://mowser.com Mike Rowehl

Oh, and at Tellevision Spy, actually we do swap in the publishers ads on the pages themselves, we only put our own ads on interstitials and summary pages. There’s a bunch of info about how to control advertising on the mobile version of your site at:

http://pub.mowser.com/wiki/Main/AdvertisingFaq

We explicitly don’t put our ads on other peoples content unless we have a special agreement with them for that very reason, it would be a violation of copyright.

- Mike
http://www.tquizzle.com Travis Quinnelly

@Mike
Thanks for clearing those questions up. I know that mobile advertising is a touchy subject so thanks for informing us of how Mowser works its mojo.
http://easymobilizer.com Alan

A quick and easy way from easymobilizer.com – A mobile device detection script that displays a mobile friendly version of your current website, when your normal website is accessed from a mobile device. Default uses skweeezer to transcode.
Developers have access to a detection of a mobile device then it forks to directory containing your customised mobile version of your website.