A while back I had read about several Wordpress plugins that offered the ability to customize the viewing of your site for mobile devices. Yesterday I decided to go research the slew of plugins available out there to determine which one to implement. I reduced the field to 2 plugins. The MobilePress plugin and the WP Touch plugin. I liked the straightforward and simple approach offered by MobilePress, but then after playing with WP Touch, I decided that I like the larger number of options and ways to customize the features.

There are many options available for WP Touch Wordpress plugin that make it a great one to offer a clean mobile version for your website. This plugin was designed specifically for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices although it appears other mobile devices are supported. I’m not sure how the site renders on other devices so perhaps you can leave a comment if you try it to let me know. Once enabled, the display of the site on an iPhone looks really clean and offered some nice features. One of those which I really liked was the ability to offer a custom icon which is placed next to the title and can be displayed on your home screen as well for an iPhone or iPod Touch. They provide a link to a great iPhone icon generator which I used to create one for Lifestream Blog. You also have the ability to add more custom icons or choose from a slew of existing ones they provide for each of your sites’ pages that you choose to make available in the navigation.

Also regarding the icon functionality, you can choose which pages you want to make visible in a nice custom dropdown menu available just to the right of the title. You can also offer an RSS feed and link to the email address you setup on the Wordpress admin. The posts have several fields you can choose to display and offer a nice ajax dropdown for each of them that displays an excerpt with a link to view the full post.

One thing you need to make sure is that you follow the steps to properly configure WP Cache or WP Super Cache if you are running either of these plugins so that you’re site works properly. I was running WP Cache and had issues and then finally moved over to WP Super Cache which seems to offer better support for mobile devices.

Here’s screenshots showing the extensive settings available

Here’s a video showing some features on Lifestream Blog on my iPhone

Here’s a list of the notable features listed from the plugin page

• User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
• iPhone-like application appearance, functions
• AJAX, jQuery & effects in only 56kb
• The ability to turn advanced javascript effects & ajax on/off
• Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
• Theme native social bookmarking support
• iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
• Ajax comments, posted in real time
• Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
• Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
• Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
• Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
• Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
• Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
• Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
• Favicon fetch & conversion to .png for links displayed using the WP blogroll
• Support for FlickrRSS plugin, Blip.it video plugin
• Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
• Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)
• Automatic Links page layout with your blogroll links listed with their favicons (if you have or create a page called ‘Links’)

As part of my discovery process for posting to Lifestream Blog, I monitor a large number of outlets looking for interesting items in the world of Lifestreaming. Most of the items I find don’t ever make it onto the blog. A subset of what I find is interesting enough that I usually share it via Twitter, FriendFeed, and Delicious. If you follow me on those services then you may see those items but my suspicion is that often you don’t. It is this content that I’ve currently been exploring ways on how to highlight more effectively on the blog.

On the right sidebar I have my Delicious Feed of Lifestreaming tagged content displayed under “Latest Info”. So if you were to visit the site daily (who does that?) or subscribed to the RSS feed, you may still get that information. But I wanted to provide more than just a text feed for this. I considered using Posterous, Tumblr, and FriendFeed to do this primarily because of the powerful bookmarklet features available for each of these. The goal was to use these services and then embed the feed into my sidebar. I thought by providing the richer forms of content with images and videos it would make for a more compelling experience. But after giving more thought to this, there were several compelling reasons to not go down this path. I wasn’t happy with some of the limitations of being able to embed and customize the content and once again it would require people to follow a secondary RSS feed to get everything. Also by having an external source of information you couldn’t use the site search to find all of the content. Lastly I also think it’s easier to keep as many resources as I find here on my blog where I can also interact with all the conversations that revolve around the content as well.

So with this decision I have been researching several Wordpress tools to help facilitate ways to make posting this information easier and offer some of the features available in the tools I had considered. One incredibly useful tool is the Press This feature already available in Wordpress which I hadn’t considered previously using. It basically offers most of the functionality available from other services in a bookmarklet that allows you to easily create posts to Wordpress.

Here is a video that demonstrates the feature:

You can find the feature by clicking on “Tools” in your Wordpress admin section. You can find more info here as well.

I’ve also been looking for any other tools to help with this and came across the Wordpress QuickPost plugin. I haven’t played with it yet but plan on seeing if it offers any additional features.

So for now I have averaged a pretty low output of posts from the blog averaging only 2-3 a week. I plan on increasing that quite a bit by starting to highlight content this way. I think part of my previous concerns in doing this is that it might cause too much content being created with my personal reviews or commentary getting muddled or lost. While my output may increase a bit, hopefully that won’t be the case.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on how you use external tools effectively or have found ways to optimize Wordpress to do so. Also, if you have any thoughts on my increasing posts to Lifestream Blog using this method.

Thanks,

Mark

I saw over at Woo Themes that they have recently released the Irresistible premium Wordpress theme for FREE. This theme took 4th place of the top 10 themes selected from a contest that Woo Themes ran last year. The designer, Izuddin Helmi also won 1st place with another submission.

This theme caught my eye very quickly as it is both styled and has functionality specifically catered to a Lifestreamer. I thought this theme looked so great that I had to try it out and write a review.

Before I get into the details take a look at the screenshot of the theme below after I installed it and plugged in all my data.

Click for a cleaner image

Not sure you feel the same way I do, but this theme struck me immediately as being really nice visually and breaking out the content in a unique way that I really hadn’t seen before. I feel it’s a clean fresh look that works well to bring your Lifestream to a blog. The image above shows the custom homepage option which provides small excerpts from blog posts and includes the Lifestreaming components. There is also another traditional homepage you can set it to use that displays full posts with images and utilizes a standard single sidebar on the right.

So now I’ll get into the setup and options. After copying over the theme and selecting it you have several things you need to configure to get your homepage and content setup properly. There is a dedicated options page to make this a pretty simple process. The myPhotos section is pulled in by providing your Flickr user account information. Flickr appears to be the only service supported for this section. myLifestream requires that you install and configure the great Lifestream Wordpress plugin by David Cramer available here. You have the ability to set the number of items you want displayed on the homepage for blog posts, photos, and Lifestream items. The myVideos section has a unique way of pulling in your latest videos. Simply create a new post and copy the embed code into a custom field that is added by the theme and then simply use the tag video which sets a flag for it to be placed on the homepage. Unlike photos, you don’t have to define a specific service and it appears to support many different video services.

So beyond all the Lifestreaming options I just pointed out, there are some other great features included in the theme options:

• There is support for 9 different color schemes all controlled via a dropdown that simply selects a different CSS file to use. The colors include blue, brown, gray, green, pink, purple, red, teal, and yellow
• You have a dedicated field to create an about section which appears on the home page with a link to read more on a dedicated page
• You can use a custom logo
• You can provide the code for your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts
• A section for placing ad or other banners on your site
• A sidebar widget that pulls in latest posts and comments and displays a tag cloud
• …and several other options to tweak the theme

3 of the 9 total color schemes available

As if that wasn’t enough you also get the full PSD file that has an extensive breakdown of all elements used so you can customize the design even further if you wish to. I have to say that this is the most impressive Lifestreaming theme I have seen or Wordpress yet and I’m tempted to use it for my personal site despite the fact I just spent a ton of time customizing another one I switched to recently. I highly recommend taking a look and tinkering with this theme to see if it may be right for you.

You can get all the details and download the Irresistible theme on the Woo Themes site here and get a live demo here.

Reader Jason Carter gave me a heads up regarding the launch of a new Lifestreaming service coming from the author of the Wordpress Lifestream plugin. I’m a big fan of the plugin and am currently using it at krynsky.com for my personal Lifestream. David Cramer, the plugin’s author, made this announcement in a blog post.

Here’s a snip from the announcement:

We want to create a platform where this data is open to the user. A platform where they can use this data whenever, wherever, and however they want. Breaking down barriers between the data providers, and the user is not our only goal, but we also want to bring you a platform which goes above and beyond what the others offer. Allowing you to group and tweak your feeds (which are being relabled as sources) to your hearts desire.

He also goes on to discuss other features such as:

• Grouping different feed types
• extensions for vBulletin, Blogger, and MediaWiki
• Communication with the Wordpress plugin (presumably to connect to your personal blog)
• Ability to get flexible access to the raw data (also presumed by me based on explanation)
• Themeable homepage

He states that the service will slowly be opening up to users over the next month, and he hopes to have a beta launch within the next 3-6 months. If you’re interested in helping him during the testing phase you can contact him by email letting him know. You can read the full post regarding the announcement here. I’m looking forward to this launch as it comes from someone who has a good amount of knowledge having spent quite a bit of time learning about the intricacies of developing for a Lifestreaming platform.

Site: Steven Beleen
Code: Tumblr custom theme

Site: Thomas Marban
Code: Custom

Site: Nate Ritter
Code: Wordpress Lifestream Plugin

Site: Alan Cheslow
Code: FriendFeed Embed Widget

Site: Robert O’Rourke
Code: Custom