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HB Formatted for a small screen device?

Postby mhoy on Sat Jan 03, 2009 6:15 pm

Having just purchased a nifty HTC G1, I've found that browsing the HB website is a tad tedious. The 320 x 480 screen is just too small for getting around on the site. Doable, but a pain. Any thoughts on having a smaller equivalent? Yeah, I know mobile browsers are < 1% of the readers.... http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm but the number of iPhones and Gphones is growing. :D

mark
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Postby HB on Sat Jan 03, 2009 6:35 pm

Would the RSS feed suffice?

rss.xml (all posts)
news/rss.xml (topics only)

There is also an RSS feed per forum that your browser should recognize (Firefox shows an RSS feed icon in the address bar; click it to subscribe). While not shown as an RSS feed in the browser, there is also a digest:

digest/rss.xml

It shows a trimmed version of the posts; in most cases that's enough for you to decide if it's interesting enough to go to the original.
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Postby mhoy on Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:12 am

I've never really used an RSS feed, it's just not the same. Also jumping on an interesting thread is harder. Just tried it. Kinda OK in that I can figure out what thread to take a better look at.

I also really, really like how a thread once read shows the 'unread' icon when new stuff occurs. With 3-5 browsers running around the house/work, having them all sync'd is kinda wonderful.

Mark

Edited: Tried out rss.
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Postby HB on Sun Jan 04, 2009 1:08 pm

Sorry, I searched and found no mobile-friendly templates for phpBB (this one is in development and shows some promise; this one claims mobile friendliness in two minutes). A quick test of sizing the standard template to ~320 pixels was laughably bad. Your mobile device should have lots of good RSS feed readers. If so, what would need to be improved to make it more HB-friendly?

It's surprising that nobody has developed a really good mobile template for phpBB. I'll ask around again.
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Postby buzzmccowan on Sun Jan 04, 2009 4:27 pm

Hey there,
90% of the browsing I've been doing on HB in the last 5 months has been on my iPhone. I subscribed to the RSS feed through google reader on my iPhone (which just opens in the browser, not a special app just for iPhone). It doesn't show the body of the message, just the topic heading which is repeated anytime there is a reply. The nice thing is if you choose to "open original" (that is, view the post), it gives you a compressed version, still with images but compressed down, which means fast loading. Not sure if that helps you much.
Cheers,
Kaelin
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Postby Vater5B on Thu Jan 08, 2009 8:31 pm

On my BlackBerry Curve, I've been using Opera Mini to read the forums with a great deal of success. I'm sure they are working on a version for Android, so I would keep my eyes peeled for it.
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Postby EspressoObsessed on Fri Jan 09, 2009 5:43 pm

I have a Sony Ericsson Xperia (made by HTC, btw) which uses WinMo. I haven't tried Opera Mini yet, which I hear is good. But using the pre-installed Opera Mobile browser is not too painful. If you double click on the screen, you get a resized & proportional screen. Just set your font to the size that's comfortable and you're good to go. Not sure if the G1 is a touch screen, but if it is you can move very easily around each web page.
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Postby Michal on Mon Jan 19, 2009 1:57 am

After HB has moved to the faster server my iPhone can no longer access the forum. On the home page I get text saying the DNS has been changed blah blah so I reset all safari settings, cookies, etc. and do a hardware restart and software restore to find it still doesn't work. When I go to forum I get a plain white page. Is anyone experiencing this?
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Postby RapidCoffee on Mon Jan 19, 2009 3:48 am

No, works fine on my iPod Touch. Probably a server farm DNS problem. Hang in there for a few more days and it may magically go away.
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Postby jpreiser on Mon Jan 19, 2009 4:27 am

Works fine from my Nokia E71 on AT&T.

FYI, I had similar problems from a PC while connected to one network until the DNS caches got refreshed.
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