Lately its been somewhat of a hobby of mine to see how much Wordpress is really capable of doing.  I can’t even name the different amounts of projects I have used wordpress for.  The reason being?  There is a plugin for almost ANYTHING you can think of.  Most people don’t realize how simple it is to use wordpress and add plugins just to see the capabilities they may have.  I see everyone using the same general plugins, but usually not the best plugins.

Anyways, although I’m not a big bad blogger like some of the guys out there, I have a decent amount of regular readers, and I DO get a small percentage of my traffic via mobile phones (mostly iphones using safari).  I also know that I browse around quite a bit on my blackberry…and I have seen the havoc that can be wreaked with a webpage that is not optimized at all to be viewed on a phone.

Because of this little bit of awareness I have I started testing out different wordpress plugins to solve this problem for me

The first plugin I ran across was WPtouch but it appeared that this plugin is made only for the iphone, ipod, and the android.  Looks nice and everything but ummm Pass.

Next I discovered Wordpress Mobile Edition which is a pretty sweet little plugin and what I decided to go with for awhile.  One nice thing about this plugin is that you can enter the user agents to display (or not display) the mobile version to.
****Completely unrelated, but I just thought of something.  Add some “certain” user agents into this list and you have yourself a simple user agent cloaker ****
I had one small bug with the theme not showing comments correctly but it was easily fixed after googling the error and uploading a newly updated theme.  The good thing however was that this plugin worked for any mobile device, it is entirely up to me to define the user agents (phones) to display the mobile site to.

Although Wordpress Mobile Edition was pretty sweet I still wanted to see what else was out there for wordpress mobile plugins.  This is when I ventured onto Wordpress Mobile which was also pretty decent.  This plugin had some different settings to tweak things a bit more how you wanted, but the author has inserted links and ads into the plugin which are displayed unless you pay to upgrade.  Ummm pass again.

Final Stop. MobilePress!  This plugin ended up being my favorite overall.  It is very simple yet everything that I needed to customize and tweak could be easily done.  Not only could it do everything I wanted, but the plugin determines not just if you’re using a mobile phone, but what kind AND you can display the site accordingly.  This means I can show one thing to my blackberry, and another thing to an iphone which has different (more) capabilities.   MobilePress also features Mobile SEO which detects mobile search bots. These mobile search bots will see the mobile version of the blog which will allow the blog to be optimized and indexed on Google and Yahoo mobile search.  So far this plugin has stood its ground and been performing quite well for me.  I plan on changing the theme to be a bit nicer visually, but other then that I probably won’t change things to much.

Now, I am wondering what YOU guys think.

If you have internet on your mobile device visit the site and let me know how you like the mobile version.  I would be happy to hear any suggestions or input you may have about any of this.  I would be super amped if you would take a screenshot or a picture of what the site looks like on your phone and post it!

I saw a blog post the other day by Bryn Youngblut where he was talking about how he dislikes blogs that use summaries for their rss feeds.  I agree with Bryn that it is quite a bit more convenient (and user friendly) for your readers if you have full rss feeds instead of summaries, which is just an attempt to lure your readers into your site so you can hopefully get something out of the visitor.  Well if your like me, and don’t really care about getting anything in return for the quality information that is disbursed, than maybe you should say why WOULDN’T I set my feed to use full articles.  I can’t think of one GOOD reason not to…

One common excuse I hear as to why people don’t do this is the fear of getting their RSS feed scraped.  It would be painfully easy for almost anyone to take YOUR content from your feed and build splogs (spam + blog = splog) or use that content however they want.  Besides the fact that these people are stealing your content with no recognition, there are MANY other reasons as to why this would not be good for you or your site.

Here is where you can EASILY solve that problem.  You can make your readers happy, and if someone DOES scrape that feed of yours, you will get multiple backlinks out of the ordeal!  Hey, now THATS a win-win situation!

You have a few options when it comes to protecting that full article feed.  To keep this article easy, I am going to pretend your using a wordpress blog since that is what 99% of people are using nowadays.  Your first option is to simply install a plugin like feed footer which adds whatever you choose at the bottom of your rss feed.  You could add something as simple as a copyright notice linking back to your site, or anchor text optimized links pointing back to wherever you want.  If your worried about getting to many links with the same anchor text on each post, you don’t have to be.  Feed footer will let you put in as many different entries as you want and rotate through them giving each post different additions to the bottom of the article.

Another option you have is to see if another plugin you use does this task even better.  For instance, I use the wordpress related posts plugin and in the settings of the plugin, you can select a box that will automatically add links to related posts into the bottom of your full RSS article.  Not only are you going to get great backlinks with perfect anchor text, but you’re going to get more than one of them!  This will ALSO keep your readers on your blog more since they often run into another suggested article that interests them even more.

If you would like to check out what exactly these plugins do, I have them setup and running right now.  Just subscribe to my rss feed and check out the bottom of each article.

Hopefully if you’re still using summary feeds this will encourage you to flip on over to full article feeds!

If you have any concerns with this information, or have a different solution to this problem, please comment and share your knowledge.