This morning I got the motivation to attempt to make my blog format correctly on the iPhone. I expected it to be a lot more challenging then it really was. I began this project by reading the Apple provided Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone, specifically looking at Chapter 2: Configuring the Viewport. The viewport is how you tell your content, what the viewable area of the iPhone actually is.

Apple recommends that you set the viewport width to device-width so that the scale is 1.0 in portrait orientation and the viewport is not resized when the user changes to landscape orientation.

My wife Karen kicks so much ass. She designed and created my new banner for me. I couldn’t ask for anything cooler if I tried. pheer.

Looking through last months logs, I noticed an entry from a google search that made me giggle like a little school girl.

198.116.xx.xx - - [09/Oct/2007:14:55:56 -0600] “GET /09-17-2007/behind-the-scenes-with-snort-part-2/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 6712 “http://www.google.com/search?q=waldo.file&hl=en&start=20&sa=N” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7″

I obfuscated the IP for obvious reasons, but suffice to say a traceroute of the IP, reveals:

14 border.hcn.hq.nasa.gov (198.116.xx.xx) 87.622 ms 84.963 ms 84.978 ms

I know, I know .. who cares right? It’s just a random person at a random place googling for something random. In this specific case however, it’s someone from NASA; searching for specific information about snort/barnyard. I don’t know why it’s important to me, but having someone from an agency that is primarily run by geeks and nerds find my site possibly useful, makes me all warm inside. (hopefully that didn’t make you vomit inside your mouth.)

As I wrote in an earlier post, I’ve been working on a mobile version of my blog. The mobile version is now operational, and it looks pretty damn good on my mobile phone’s browser. I have been learning a lot about mobile content since the start of this project and I’m pretty proud of what I have accomplished; but there is tons more to learn about.

Which reminds me: mobi.trepullins.net is now deprecated. The new wordpress plugin I am using, will auto-detect and redirect based on browser user-agent. You only need to go to http://trepullins.net and you will get the mobile version on your phone and the full blown version on your workstation.

I’ve been fooling around with some plugins for wordpress to detect and reformat my site to be phone compliant. I know .. it’s terribly nerdy and honestly it looks pretty bad on my Sony Ericsson w810i’s “media net browser” .. though it does look a little better in Opera Mini. I came across a site for emulating a few cellphones, while reading about formatting websites for mobile phones. Right now the mobile version is pretty crappy looking, but I will do my best to get it looking nice*.

* By looking nice, I mean nice on the few phones and emulators I have access to.