The Future Buzz Is Now iPhone/Android/Kindle Friendly

May 17, 2009 Author Adam Singer In Meta

Of the last 100,000 visitors to The Future Buzz, 2,145 – or around 2.14% were using iPhones, iPod touches or Android devices.  So in an effort to make things easier for readers on the go, today I have done two things:

1)  Installed the WP Touch plugin

The guys at Brave New Code made a slick little plugin which auto-detects if users are browsing via an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android powered device and serves a beautiful mobile version.  It’s simple to install and makes any WordPress powered blog look clean on leading mobile platforms.  Fire up The Future Buzz in your iPhone to have a look, you’ll get something like this (I’ll work on customizing it further in the future, lots of neat options in the plugin):

Only issue with WP Touch is if you’re using a caching plugin to keep your blog Digg-proof, you’ll have to tweak it slightly for the mobile version to be served and not a cached page.  It’s not difficult though and is described clearly on the plugin page.

(hat tip to Steven Hodson, as I discovered this by browsing his blog on my iPhone).

2)  Registered a Kindle Edition of The Future Buzz

Amazon decided to open up the Kindle publishing program to all bloggers.  If you’ve got a shiny new Kindle and prefer to read content from The Future Buzz there, you can subscribe through Amazon.  I wish I could make this free but that wasn’t an option, so you’ll pay the Kindle tariff to view content there.  I am hoping Amazon changes this later on to provide the option of free and am thinking they might – but in the meantime it’s always advantageous to get your blog involved in these types of programs early.

I haven’t written much on changes under the hood here as I’m mostly interested in sharing marketing strategy, but as I work to modernize this blog (a new design is also on my to-do list) I’ll start to share more of what I’m doing so you can adapt what you find useful for your own site.

The key is to make content simple to get for all users/platforms, as everyone accesses the web differently.  Whether you’re reading this in email, RSS, on your iPhone/Kindle, or in a web browser, it really doesn’t matter and is totally personal preference – but as a publisher it’s worth it to make your content accessible in all avenues.  And with so many different companies catering to helping bloggers connect with audiences, it has never been a better time to be a content publisher.