Design vs Art Blog

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% [?]

I have recently done a mobile version of this blog and would like to share my experiences about it with you. I have a Nokia E61 and spend a lot of time surfing the web on my phone, although this device is not the best I could have. So I decided to make a mobile version of this blog to make it available to more readers.

I landed to Andy Moore’s site, a dotMobi Certified Mobile Web Developer who has been working with the mobile internet for some time (as he says on his home page). Andy has developed a nice plugin for WordPress to automatically create a mobile version of WordPress blogs.

The plugin is very easy to install and once you do it displays a “WordPress Mobile” configuration tab where you can change many settings for your blog’s mobile version like the use of CSS, mobile posting and tracking configurations.

Click here to see Design vs Art Blog Mobile Version on an emulator

The plugin comes with AdMob Mobile Internet Advertising ads embedded that you can set with your own publisher ID. This is a great feature as you can enable ads on your blog’s mobile version without any extra settings. The plugin creator, Andi Moore, asks you to share the earnings with him and he also embedded this  feature into the plugin but lets you decide how much would you like to share. This is something you can get rid of if you get into the code but to be honest sharing a little bit with somebody that is making your life easier is totally fine.

In my opinion the design of the mobile version of your site is quite OK if you are more interested in the content, but Andy says that you can always modify the CSS file. Navigation and usability are fine and adds do not disturb at all. It is worth giving a try!

Popularity: 23% [?]