An American in Jordan

The Safari browser on the iPhone is a marvel in that it displays a web page the way it was meant to be displayed rather than a dumbed-down version. For most web sites, this is a welcome thing, but when it comes to blogs, I want to get past all the sidebars and extra graphics and move straight to what I want to read: the posts.

Some bloggers have created an iPhone-friendly (or mobile-friendly) version of their site, but it takes a lot of time, a decent knowledge of CSS and a test environment in order to pull that off. So for those of us who are a little short on one or more of the above variables, there is now a solution.

Welcome WPtouch, a plug-in for Wordpress that strips away the fat on your blog and presents the lean, mean content in a most fashionable way.

Once the plug-in is installed, you have the option to designate which pages are viewable and assign icons to those pages. Posts are easily visible in chronological order with small badges indicating the number of comments for each post. The viewing of comments and the option of displaying the comment form can be enabled or disabled.

The coolness factor of this plug-in grabbed me right away. After a few seconds, the logical part of me kicked in and I began thinking, “How often would someone check out my blog on a small mobile device like an iPhone?” And then the wheels kept turning as I determined that my goal should always be to make my site more accessible in any format and so it certainly wouldn’t hurt to install this simple and free plug-in in order to make my little corner of the world a better place.