PDA Optimized Web Sites
Note: See the newer version at: http://www.cantoni.org/2006/09/30/pdamobilewebsites.
I’ve started pulling together a collection of web sites that are optimized for small-screen devices such as PDAs. A few sites (like this one) are designed to be simple and degrade gracefully. Other more complicated sites usually create a special PDA optimized version of their site.
There are some similar link collections, but most that I’ve seen don’t do everything I’m looking for:
- The list of PDA optimized web site links must be updated frequently
- The PDA web sites must be current
- The PDA web sites must have true PDA friendly or PDA optimized content
Simply point your mobile device browser to cantoni.mobi. In fact, set it as your home page in your mobile browser.
Although I am partial to Palm-branded devices, any Palm OS, Pocket PC, or other mobile device should work with these sites. Note: these are PDA optimized web sites created in HTML, not WAP sites which are more often used from a mobile phone.
Method
Currently, I’m storing my list of links in a Microsoft Access database. A Perl script queries the database and creates the HTML page which I manually FTP to the web server.
In the future, I’d like to set up a script to check the links regularly (perhaps twice a week) to make sure they are still valid and automatically update the file on cantoni.org. I’d also like to take a measurement of each page (including images) to see how “friendly” they really are. (Some sites still have an incredible amount of data which creates a real problem with a limited bandwidth device, especially when you pay by the byte.)