Squaresoft has upgraded their templates to automate different screen sizes for mobile devices and PCs. According to the ads on TWIT it works great...

Ye, its a double edged sword... and in some cases you have to have a separate mobile site... but my 2 arguments for (if possible) keeping the same layout for web/mobile are

1) if you visit a site often, you know how to navigate around. Making a 'mobile' site means that your users have to learn how to navigate your site all over again

2) if your mobile site is missing features that are available on your 'web' site (which would work on a mobile device), then you have made a BIG mistake and will seriously annoy your users

For some sites, it makes sense to have a different mobile experience, but for article/blog based sites, this is almost never the case imo

I think the issue, for me anyways, is defining "mobile." You can easily go overboard and define css for screen resolutions from 100x200 and increment up to whatever the largest mobile size is, then do the same thing to accommodate all computers from 11" up to 30".

I think this is really an issue with how complex the layout is and making decisions on what to keep and leave out. I have a whopping 3 division tags on this site: <header>, <nav>, <article> and I don't think that will change because I prefer to keep this one minimal with no fluff (and also, fml, I have designing sites). I'm not attempting to create something that looks like 2+2 or heroku. I just hope that the content will be enough to keep people interested. If the idea is to strip away all the excess, then I am left with something that is easy to maintain, update, and add sections of interest.

I did something stupid: I wrapped the anchor tags in the nav section with <h3> tags. If I remove those, the site will be perfectly fine with mobile. I have no idea why I placed the tags like that. I fail so miserably with design because I am too self-centered. I have poor eyesight, even with my contacts or glasses on, thus I naturally attract to large print.

Aside from this, there are quite a few blackberry and other non-standard browsers viewing the site. With this, I only aim to have graceful degradation.

In re: discussion of separate sites for mobile/desktop - I think a big factor in the decision is the purpose of your site.

For blogs/news sites, I think it makes a lot of sense to have 2 versions. If your purpose is to present information, it seems advantageous to always present your product in its easiest to consume format. For me, I much prefer mobile versions on my phone because they make reading easier, not because they're less CPU/memory intensive.

Also, presumably you're using some sort of CMS if you're running a blog or similar, so it isn't like you're hammering out HTML tags everytime you want to make a post, right? I don't have a blog, and I've only suffered the horror of working on Wordpress once before, but it seems like it shouldn't be too difficult to setup two versions of the site so that any content you post is automatically available through both versions.

If anyone is thinking about how to detect mobile devices for redirect to a mobile site/app, this is an excellent resource:

http://www.detectmobilebrowsers.com/

They have code snippets for detecting mobile user agent strings based on a regularly updated regex (most recent update was last month). It's been ported to a ton of different languages, as well as Apache htaccess files. I use it for auto redirecting to the HTML5 mobile version of my app.

http://foundation.zurb.com/

I hear this is what the cool kids are using nowadays.

I predict that in one years time all the cool kids will have less than 75 gigs of dangling CSS code in their website.

I'm perfectly happy with my 15 lines of non-minified CSS. It's mobile friendly too.

<-- Can't throw stones as a bootstrap user.

Thanks, that was a very helpful answer. It sounds like stuff that can be overcome with some experience.

what are the advantages of this over bootstrap?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=foundation+vs+bootstrap

more like greg "not" nice

haha really i just wanted to link to the google results cause i did the search myself after reading your post

thats the first site i remembered that would link to the google results cause i was too lazy to try to remove the long parameter string from google.com

I'm considering some changes:

URLs:

Since the idea of the site is to do a bunch of projects, would it make more sense to have URLs like: /music-theory/circle-of-fifths-part-one, /music-theory/circle-of-fifths-part-two, then /music-theory just being a page with the project listed? The current URL would either do a full redirect or show a 404. Not sure yet.

Social Media Buttons:

Two things I don't want are a counter and the div on this side that scrolls with you on the page. I'm thinking about putting the share buttons on the bottom of the article. Is there any testing items to be found on location or is this something I should implement myself to see? Mind that the first article is north of 3500 words (which I'm sure makes your favorite SEO cry) and all of the articles are going to be around that length.

I'm going to do Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. I'm considering Delicious and/or Tumbl'r as well since there is some healthy traffic from there as well. I've also found some custom icons that look really cool and fit the style of the site really well.

Comment Boxes:

The comments I've seen around have been really high quality and the code examples have been awesome.

A few things stop me from using a comment box:

1- I don't want to pay Heroku for having a larger database, but this is a non-issue really. It would take a long time to bloat the database and so what if its an extra $10 a month.

2- Not sure how to secure and sanitize the input. Drupal / Wordpress is great for this stuff. Anyways, I'm not sure how much is taken care of by the JDBC for PostgreSQL.

3- I don't want to constantly moderate the comments.

Ultimately, I'm still not sure if I want a comment area. Most of the comment areas on other sites simply suck and I just don't want that here.

@daveT http://disqus.com/ - its super easy to setup/maintain, and its v popular

edit: popular is good because people will trust it when signing in with twitter/openid etc

I have such crappy luck with disqus comment sections on my Macs that I don't think I would ever use it. It so rarely loads before I've lost interest and went to the next site.

Perfect! I don't want comments from Apple users anyways. j/k.

I don't like that Disqus idea because I don't want to force people to log in only to leave a comment. I stand against user profiling and I'm not comfortable helping twitter, facebook, etc. achieve those goals.

IntenseDebate appears to have anon commenting. I'll keep researching some alternatives. I don't have a huge issue with creating my own comment area.

I think I would just use disqus. I'm pretty sure you can have anonymous comments.

It takes like 2 minutes to setup and just works. More importantly it's used in so many big sites that it has become a familiar interface for commenting. It will make your users more happy if they see something they're using on 4 other sites.

ye, I dont think people have an issue logging into disqus, and I am fairly sure you can comment anonymously.

The big reasons for using it are that its a) easy to setup b) decentralised from your server. If you move server/platform, your comments will move along with it. This doesnt sound like a big deal, but if you are moving to a different blogging platform, it can be huge.

Kerowo, what issue are you having with the Mac? Is it Safari or the mobile browser? Apparently Disqus works on webkit and I though Safari is webkit.

The research shows that Disqus does not support anon comments. That could be the killer for me. If people want to use fb, twitter, et. al. to post comments, that is fine, but I don't want to abandon those who don't want to use it. I know those platforms are ubiquitous and that is the issue. For example, I have 3 twitter accounts. I don't want to be forced to use one or the other since all of the accounts are anon (and spammy).

It is hard to believe, but there are many people who don't have social media accounts. I only have mine to test marketing ideas and they're all basically sunsetted due to abandonment. Turns out that it's not what it's cracked up to be, or more pointedly, it turns out the information on how they are effective are misleading at best. There are superior ways to market.

Forcing users to sign in also assumes that all of the current social sites are going to be popular ad infinitum, which is a terrible assumption, IMO. I certainly don't want to force people to create accounts at these places just to post a comment, and what if someone want to use Tumbl'r or heaven forbid, myspace?

I know the above is ethical, but I think that this is all an important consideration as well.

I'm comparing both IntenseDebate and Disqus. It appears they both allow "guest" posting.

This is tough decision. I guess one (not really) bad thing about IntenseDebate is that there is a limit of 100 comments (or threads?) for each page. I don't know if there is a limit on Disqus.

Disqus seems slightly more intuitive in the backend. For example, I can't seem to find the plugin code for Intense Debate anywhere... ID seems more feature-rich in the backend, but I don't think it matters either way. Something tells me both systems are bound to be buggy.

Users can make a disqus specific login too if they don't have a standard social login in the off chance you decide you want to turn off guest posting later. Then for them it's no different than making a regular account.

I tend to analyze, use and compare different techs/services until my eyes bleed. Using disqus is actually one of the easiest decisions you can make. Save your time to research something of more importance like the next article you're going to write.

Disqus wins. Why? The other one is too difficult to use.

The only complaint is that there is no rich text-editing, so people who want to leave code aren't going to be happy.

I have guest accounts turned on for now.

Yeah, writing the next 300000 word monster which should hopefully be done tonight. These articles are hard to write.

BTW, Shoe Lace: Recall when you said I am probably a better programmer than you? I hope after seeing my bonkers code with the OCW and more half-assed code, you are willing to take that assertion back?

One small craveat of discus to be aware of is that it uses the URL of the page to determine which content to display. This means that example.com is different to www.example.com is different to www.example.com/ (I had the issue with the trailing slash when I moved platforms). Not a biggie, but just to be aware of.

Where's this half-assed code you speak of? I thought some of your submissions were pretty good so far.

I like this week's pset btw.

Using Python and Pylab you will design and implement a stochastic simulation of patient and virus population dynamics, and reach conclusions about treatment regimens based on the simulation results.

Where I most noticed it was on Engadget where comment threads would just load and load and never display. I checked today and they are using livefyre now and it looks like if there are more than about 40 comments it won't load either. Haven't tried comparisons with Chrome or FF to see if it's just Safari or my connection or whatever.

Disqus is terrible for communities. It's OK for write-only comments sections where kooks spout off but nobody actually cares what the comments say.