Design vs Art Blog

I have recently found another way to make this blog available for mobile users. Feedm8 makes a mobile compatible version of your blog, it’s free to create it and free for the users to read. It also put mobile ready ads on your blog and share the earnings with the blog’s publisher (60% of the revenue is for the blog owner). But what I want to point out is the easiness of this site.

I landed to the sign up page when I clicked on another site, and the procedure is extremely easy, you only have to fill the shortest form ever with your blog’s address or feed URL and your email address. That’s it! Then you have your blog’s mobile version created.

The feedm8 design is not flawless, although the problems are not big. For example, when I was navigating my account I got this message telling me to click on the “Promote” icon to, obviously, promote my blog.

But I could not find that Promote icon so easily, it took me some time to discover that the Promote icon was a star with an arrow on it (?).

This how this blogs looks like on feedm8:

I like feedm8 because it is so easy to set up and use. They have done a good design work.

Popularity: 10% [?]

What’s your home page? I was using iGoogle for a long time but I decided to try Netvibes, an Ajax based personalized start page.

The whole thing is Ajax and it works perfect. You can add as many modules including RSS/Atom feeds and other widgets, then you can sort them in personalized tabs, for example, I have a tab for “Web2.0″ feeds, another for Web2.0 feeds in German language and another more for the ones in Spanish. Changing tabs is fast as the news are loaded and reloaded only from time to time, and not every time you go to that tab.

My personal Netvibes home page

You can also choose among many third party “universes”, those are like Netvibes home pages designed and customized by other companies. Like this one made by The Financial Times:

I like so much to have a module with my Remember The Milk tasks, another with my Gmail and another one with a Google/Yahoo! search box. clicking on a small arrow that appears on the module title as you hover over, allows you to open and close that module, an important feature for privacy reasons too.

The whole design is very slick and adding modules is extremely easy. For example, to add a feed just paste the site address and Netvibes will list the available feeds for that site. It also has a very useful “In my page” search that searches only among your feeds. Fantastic.

They also have a reasonable amount of documentation on their Netvibes’ Developer Network home page. Their Universal Widget API (UWA) from Netvibes allows developers to build widgets that will work on every platform or blog system. Your personal Netvibes home page is also reachable through your mobile device at m.netvibes.com

Picture taken from the Netvibes blog

I really like the Netvibes User Interface and don’t have complaints so far

Popularity: 7% [?]