Having a blog has its benefits, but sometimes people want to access your site via a mobile device and, well…. lets face it, rendering your site across many different mobile platforms, looks, well…. LIKE CRAP. Hell, half the time its unreadable.

How to Enable Your Site For Mobile Viewing

If you want to mobile enable your blog, its super-easy with the service provide by mofuse.com (no I’m not getting paid to write this). Literally its only a few steps and you’re done.

1. Create an account
2. Plug in your blog url that you want to “mobilize”
3. Choose the url  you want
4. You’re done!

You can view my mobile site at: http://donnfelker.mofuse.mobi/

Here’s what it looks like in a emulator:

Basic Mobile Phone	Apple IPhone

 

Sprucing Up the URL

Although this is real easy to set up, the URL “donnfelker.mofuse.mobi” just seems clunky to me. Mofuse gives you the ability to set this to a custom domain.

I wanted my domain name to be representative of the content that was being delivered, therefore I chose mobile.blog.donnfelker.com (it is the mobile version of my blog right?).

Changing this is fairly simple, however you will have to alter your DNS records. 

1. Log into your mofuse account and click on the blog that you’ve Mobilized.
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2. Click Custom Domain
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3. Enter your domain that you will be using and make note of the CNAME entry you will have to make.
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4. Click save and you’re now done with your mofuse portion of this task.

Adding a custom CNAME to your DNS records.

1. This all depends on where your site is hosted and where your DNS is located. Mine is located on my host. *Important note: This will be different for each person, but this is how I alter my DNS with my host.*
1. Log into your host.
2. I selected my domain for editing.
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3. Clicked DNS Configuration
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4. At this point in time my DNS info was displayed to me. It looks like this:
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5. Click “Add DNS CNAME Record”
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6. Add the CNAME record and click Submit
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7. Done

You will have to wait up to 48 hours for this CNAME to take effect. I did mine last night at 9pm and when I woke up at 6 it was already up and running.

 

Conclusion

Its super simple to set this up and kudos goes to the guys/gals at mofuse. Now I can go to mobile.blog.donnfelker.com and view my blog on my mobile or send the link to anyone else who wants to see it on a mobile. Excellent!  Good luck in setting up your own mobile blog!

I've played with a lot of Flash applications, hell, I've written a TON of them. I was one of the very few developers developing/integrating PHP/MySQL/Flash 5/MX/ActionScript programming that I know of at the time. Here's a few links to some of them I built that are still online.

• Brad B ECard
• Scarub Online Media One Sheet
• Die Young Online Media One Sheet (looks like the music is broken for some reason)

Unfortunately the Internet archive doesn't keep track of flash movies that well otherwise I'd link the SUPER COOL ones (tons of animation based upon user input and data from the persistence store) I did that had TONS of integration. I had a ton of other ones that I've done but either the band or label went under so they're not online and I don't have a portfolio site for them (although I should for historical purposes). Between my stints at Lava Records, Atlantic Records, Dreamworks Records, Nitro Records and the now defunct Grave 9 Records I wrote a lot of PHP/MySQL and Actionscript. Thank god those days are over. Oh .NET how I love thee... anyway... enough geek talk.

Why The Best Ever?

One of my favorite hip-hop artists, Atmosphere, released a new album called "When Life Gives You Lemons" (You Paint That Sh!t Gold). Seriously, its a great album, but this isn't a music review site - its a technology blog so lets back to topic Felker ...

With the release of this album they released a web app that allows users to "Tag The World" (www.paintitgold.com) which in effect lets the user take a screen capture (through the use of a Flash App) by typing in a URL and then you can use a set of tools to tag up the site of your choice.

You can use spray paint, stencils, different colors, sizes, markers, etc, its cool. I literally lost about 2 hours on this site. I got sucked in this evening. That NEVER happens, so when it does I'm completely amazed at how the site did it. After being on the net for 10+ years I thought I'd seen it all, NOPE. This is cool. I've seen some "Paint" sites before, but this one got me sucked in.  The other sites that implemented the "paint" feature were very MSPaint. Lets face it, MSPaint, well... sucks. Its great to grab screen shots, but then again, why aren't you using Paint.NET?

Anyway, that aside here's what I did to my site. Honestly, I must have created over 50 of these before I just said screw it and decided to save it for the heck of it.

(click the image to see a larger version on the actual site)

The real awesome-ness is that the spray paint has pressure, and you can size the stencils, rotate them, and just go crazy in general. Afterwards,  you can submit your "masterpiece" (if you want to call it that - mine definitely is ... look at my new digs on my picture above - *haha*) to a gallery on the site. Afterwards it gives you code to post your masterpiece on your blog (which is how I got it to my site).

Conclusion

Take a look at how simple it is to use this site.

I mean it, literally look at how easy it is to use. You don’t have to be a computer genius to get it to work. It just works. This site has a GREAT UX and its fun as hell. There is music playing in the background. You get to tag up a site, hell, just have fun, and you can save your drawing in the end. Every single Web 2.0 designer that wants to make a fun compelling app can learn something from this site. The saying goes "Don't Make Me Think". Not only did this site NOT make me think, it led my hand to allow me to escape into their site (and literally escape reality for a couple of hours).

The only thing I wish they had was a "undo" feature that worked as I expected. From what I could find it you could only "clear the canvas" ... but... then again... this is a hip hop site and the hip hop culture embraces graffiti, and in a true blank canvas sort of way this site embraces the graffiti element beautifully. In the real world you can't just "undo" a line of paint on a wall (or train for that matter). :) You have to keep on going whether you like the piece or not. Its art. :)

Final Thoughts

Kudos to the developers of this site, great job guys.

Heuer lets create a version in Silverlight that blows this one out of the water. :)