Russell Beattie

I was reading this post by Andrew Currie earlier comparing various mobile transcoders, or as he puts it "The Ultimate Website Mobilizer Smackdown" and after declaring that Mowser "returned perhaps the best-looking mobilized page," (W00t!) he mentioned that several other sites enabled him to create a QR Code for his blog, and I thought that was a great idea.

In case you're not familiar with the idea - QR Codes are scannable images of encoded data that you can use with mobile phones to quickly pull the data from the image into your phone - useful for things such as URLs, email addresses and other small bits of information. Check out the Wikipedia article on QR Codes for more info - as with many crazy ass mobile technologies, it's already very Big in Japan.

So, I found some PHP code that dynamically makes a QR Code, had Miker test it on his N95 and threw together a new keyword for Mowser. Since this is a sort of niche thing, I'm not putting a link to it on every page or anything, but power users can go to the home page of Mowser.com enter the keyword 'qr' plus the URL they want to encode and get a QR Code that can be scanned or posted to a website. For example, in Miker's site above, I typed in 'qr thisismobility.com' in the main page and got the QR Code shown above. Pretty simple!

Mobile geekery at its finest.

-Russ