Russell Beattie

Woops, things are moving fast and furious. I desperately need to document what I’m doing here to explain it a bit better… I’ll have a screencast up today and add a “learn more…”. It probably would have been ideal to launch *after* I got all that stuff done, but I wanted to get the site up for Mobile Monday Silicon Valley yesterday, so it’s there. BEWARE OF CHUNKS OF ENCODING - some sites look like crap still. It’ll get better rapidly, promise.

Here’s a quick summary: Mowser is short for “mobile browser” and is meant to enable any site to go mobile simply by adding a link through mowser.com, for example:

http://mowser.com/web/www.wikipedia.com

If the site has a link header which points to a handheld stylesheet, then it will be included - a great example is Opera’s site:

http://mowser.com/web/my.opera.com

Which includes this link in the HTML header:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/community/css/mobile.css” type=”text/css” media=”handheld” />

If you want to see a site that doesn’t have a handheld stylesheet and is pretty unreadable, you can add in your own style sheet as well (I’ll get a real example up shortly, here’s what it looks like):

http://mowser.com/web/example.com&style=http://example.com/handheld.css

If you include a meta-tag header with YOUR AdMob advertisement code, then mowser will include that advertisement in the mobile site:

<meta scheme=”admob” name=”siteid” content=”YOUR_SITEID_HERE_123123? />

AGAIN, that’s *your* site id code, so that if someone clicks on that ad, YOU get the revenue, not mowser.

If you want to make sure that Google’s mobile web search uses mowser.com to adapt your site to a mobile phone instead of it’s own (less than optimal) transcoder, then simply include a header like this in your page:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/html” media=”handheld” href=”http://mowser.com/web/russellbeattie.com/notebook/” title=”Mobile/PDA” />

And finally, mowser.com includes a “discovery” section where you can discover mobilized content via 500+ mobile links, 2000+ of the most popular news feeds, and quick-search keywords.

For more info on the general idea, I’ll attach a PDF from last nights presentation. More to come soon!

-Russ