Listen to the podcast for some more information and insight than what’s available in our quick reviews.

This podcast is available through iTunes so don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast if you have an iPod, or in another podcatcher if you have a different MP3 player.

[display_podcast]

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OperaMini – Mobile Browser

Free web browser that works on pretty much any phone that has web capability. So far mobile browsing was way behind what you would normally get on your PC. OperaMini 4 changes that by enabling you to view the pages as they appear on your PC. Whether it’s an image or a flash video, it can auto adjust the content to your phone’s screen size.

As you can see in the image below, even crowded pages appear quite good. There is an option allowing you to zoom-in on any part of the page. Apart from that, it’s really fast. Almost two times faster and efficient (cheaper) than most of the other mobile browsers. You can see it in action and get detailed feaure list in our earlier OperaMini review here. To download Opera mini go here.

Another good mobile browser is Skyfire. Unfortunately the product is still in beta and available for download only to selected users. If you’re interested you can sign-up for invite from their website. Check it out in action on this Youtube video.

How to Mobilize your Favorite Websites

There are plenty of free services where you can mobilize RSS-enabled websites in no time. You don’t have to be a geek to create a mobile version of your blog and these tools can help you out. Your blog content won’t just look readable on a mobile phone screen, but will also load faster. Almost all of these apps require only RSS feeds. Add RSS feeds you want to mobilize, get a link to mobile-friendly page, add this page to your mobile bookmarks and done.

Google Mobilizer

The simplest mobilizer out there. Simply enter the address of the page and click go. If you are short on bandwidth there is a checkbox to disable the images as well. Read more …

Generate Mobile Page using Google Reader

Apparently Google Reader can generate a mobile view of any RSS feed without any effort. All you need to do is append the feed address to the following URL.
http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/[feed_address]. (via Digital Inspiration)

MoFuse



We have already covered MoFuse here.

Mowser



Read more at Mobilize any Website with Mowser.

Other web services that can help you with generating mobile websites are Andanza, Mippin and WireNode.

If all you’re looking for is a simple way to create mobile edition for your favorite websites then any of these should do.

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MoFuse in Action

MoFuse works by mobilizing your feeds. Sounds simple huh? Well, I assure you that the guys behind MoFuse are diligent to ensure that this application tickles your mobile fancy. They’ve included all kinds of features including an SMS widget, an automatic redirect script, automatic image resizing, fully compliant .mobi sites hosted entirely on MoFuse’s servers, and even the ability to brand your mobile site with your own logo.

Even if you don’t have feeds (but who doesn’t these days) MoFuse has provided a way…just create an account and add your static mobile content.

Customize your Mobile Content

Maybe you’re like me, and just not satisfied with the vanilla wrapper. Get your customize on!

Want to change your default “grow” generated domain name? No problem, sign up for an account and you’ll be able to change your URI to something more appropriate. Not enough? Keep customizing you can even add things like static text, links, RSS feeds and comments. They’ve even included the ability to change the colors of everything from the text to the header background. If that’s still not enough, you can now add your logo (scaled down to under 200px wide and 30px in height) to be the default header.

MoFuse also has an automatic redirect script you can place in the top of your website that will redirect mobile visitors to your MoFuse site automatically with no fuss. They’ll think you’re just that good, but you’ll know the truth…MoFuse’s handling this for you.

Little Quirks

When creating the mobile site for MakeUseOf.com, we ran into an issue with the redirection script not working. Through many-a-emails, and ultimately talking with David Berube (MoFuse’s Founder & Chief Architect) via IM, we figured out that there was indeed an issue with the way PHP was setup on the MakeUseOf server.

The MoFuse API (which is used to determine mobile devices) uses the PHP directive “allow_url_include”. Many hosts either disable this feature, or don’t allow this directive at all. Since MakeUseOf.com is on a dedicated server, we have the ability to enable this for this feature to work. If you have it, there are two methods to turn on this PHP directive.

• .htaccess – Edit your .htaccess file on your webserver and add the following: php_flag allow_url_include On
• php.ini – This will either require you to be a server admin, or require your host to turn this feature on for you in your php.ini file.

If you don’t have access to this, you might just ask your host for this. All they can do is say no, right?

Wrap-Up

MoFuse gets an A+ for ease of use and in the end result product. While I had a little bumpy ride trying to get the mobile MUO site going (the whole redirect issue), the end result is great. If you browse to www.makeuseof.com from a mobile device you’ll see the mobile site automatically. Those of you who just want to see it, can visit m.makeuseof.com in your normal browser and the good guys at MoFuse will emulate a mobile device for you.

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

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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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.

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1. Amung.us – Amung.us is a tiny real-time traffic analytics widget for your blog. It tells you (and your readers) how many people are currently on the website, what pages they’re reading, where in the world they’re coming from, and more. See our Amung.us widget below:

2. Conduit – Got a niche focused blog? If so, why not to offer a custom toolbar? Enable your readers to follow-up on latest posts, search your blog, have one click access to related resources/tools and more directly from the toolbar. I am not going to dwell much into it but this is definitely a must-have. It’s really hard to convince someone to get your toolbar but if you can implement it properly it can be a major plus. I am still working on our own, and I am quite sure it will be a big addition to MUO.

3. MoFuse – Take your blog mobile. This free service lets you create mobile version of your website in a matter of minutes. All you need is a working RSS feed. Once created MoFuse can automatically detect and redirect mobile readers to a mobile version. [Demo Video]

4. SiteMeter – Comprehensive real-time website traffic counter and analytics. Follow-up on latest referrals, entry/exit pages, visitor details, visits/pageviews ratio, and a lot more. Check out MakeUseOf’s sitemeter counter here.

5. Google Analytics – Google Analytics will fill-in the parts that you won’t get with Sitemeter. It’s by far the best analytics program out there, and what’s even better is it’s free. It has everything: detailed referral reports, click heat maps, email alerts, individual page performance stats, user bounce rates, campaign tracking, and lots more. See full feature list here.

6. BlogRush / AdGridWork – Both of these networks work as “ad exchange” programs where you can earn free promotion credits in exchange for displaying non-obtrusive relevant network ads on your own website (mostly as widgets). The more traffic your website gets the more credits and referrals you earn. [Demo Video]

7. PubMatic – PubMatic allows bloggers to make maximum off their website’s advertising space by automatically placing highest performing ad units on each page. It scans multiple ad networks (Google Adsense, YPN, ValieClick, etc.), diggs into ad performance reports and shows ad units with highest payout and performance. It’s completely free, there are no charges or commissions. [Demo Video]

8. MyBlogLog – High chance you already have this one, but in case you don’t, definitely get it. There are two ways you can learn about your loyal readers, one is comments, and the other is MyBlogLog. I learned about many MUO fans this way: zia, pax, pster, mklopez, … . Btw, if you haven’t joined MakeUseOf community already, you can do so here.

9. FatFreeCart – Free shopping cart solution for your blog. It’s simple to implement (simply copy-paste) and works perfectly both with PayPal and Google Checkout.

10. Kontactr / Contactify – Both services let you create secure online ‘contact’ forms and embed it on your own blog. Or just link it from your blog using ‘contact’ link.

11. AddThis / ShareThis (Wordpress) / Madcast (Blogger, Typepad) – Let your visitors bookmark / save your posts to various social bookmarking sites, or forward as links via email.

12. Web2PDF – Free HTML to PDF conversion service for your website. Allows your readers to instantly print and save any article as PDF file. We publish lots of lists on MUO so it’s not really that useful for us, but in case you got plenty of lengthy posts than this is something your readers should appreciate. Read more about it here

That’s about it. Got anything to add? Let us know in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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