Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

Think mobile

My former editor at Country Guide, Peter Gredig, now content editor at Farms.com, blasted me for my blog not being mobile friendly. He said he could barely read the small type on his BlackBerry. “Figure it out,” he said.

His message, that came to me as a direct tweet, sat in the part of my brain where I store seemingly impossible-to-solve tasks. They sit on the shelf and tend to grow.

My first response was to argue with him – buy yourself a better pair of glasses, I thought. Then I told him he’s given me an impossible challenge. And then I did what I often do when faced with a tough problem – I turned to Google.

It turns out that it was a simple fix. Mippin, a software development company, offers a free plugin to Wordpress. Visit my blog from your BlackBerry or iPhone now and Wordpress recognizes that you’re on a mobile phone and completely changes the layout to optimize my blog for your tiny screen. Try it out.

I've learned two things:

1. Open-source software is powerful and effective. I can't believe how easy it was to make my blog mobile enabled. It was less than 20 minutes from my first search on Google to the problem being solved.

2. I need to start thinking mobile. I need to consider the mobile implications of everything web-related I do for my clients.