My good friend Peter Rukavina is always experimenting with web and mobile technologies. Often his experiments are best kept at the experimental stage, like the Open Bread project.
Other times, his experiments can prove quite powerful. He’s been a canary-in-the-coal-mine of geo-location. For example, he’s been documenting his physical location/status with the Plazes service. Today he has taken another step in that direction by setting up his own mobile website.
The phrase “mobile website” usually implies a special version of a website that is tailored to small screens and low-bandwidth. In this case, it’s not the visitor that’s mobile - it’s the website itself.
His mobile site, ruk.mymobilesite.net gives you a way to see his status, know if he’s on the phone, leave him a text-message, etc.
Back in 2003, I wrote (in a post cleverly titled Is that a web-server in your pocket?) about this very idea. I wondered if it was possible, and if it would be useful. Seeing Peter’s version of the idea in action made a light go on in my head. I think we’ll all have something like this in a few years.
Comments
Peter Rukavina - August 22, 2008 2:55 pm
I think what's most interesting about this setup is that it forces us to rethink what's a "server" and what's a "client."
We're so used to thinking of servers as static, big, expensive, central, professionally managed, etc. that it takes something neato like webserver-on-phone to jar us out of our complacency.
Peter Rukavina - August 22, 2008 3:03 pm
I note with pleasure that I have been upgraded from simple friend to "good friend" in this post.
Perhaps, with the right mix of cool-baby-toy presents for AMG, additional free laser printers, and picking up your Gong Bao tab, I can someday hope to move up the ladder to "close friend."
Steven Garrity - August 22, 2008 3:27 pm
Peter, things are moving a bit fast for me in our relationship right now. Let's slow it down for a while.
Jon - August 30, 2008 10:42 pm
I've been thinking about doing the same for a new section on the LisWiki Book Review section, but I'm not much of a coder.
On top of that, MediaWiki is a major pain to work with! That's originally how I found your site, I was looking for some way to edit the skins. I was able to finally get a little done, but not to my liking. I'm still hammering away at it. Experiencing some issues with the cgi/vs/php incompatibility. So, for example, I have to store the library in a separate directory...
As you can see, I can't even begin to get started on tracking my location with my own portable serve ;-) Props to Peter for that.
Ivy - September 5, 2008 10:00 am
Mobile sites are great. However, more and more mobile phones now offer full HTML browsing which means you don't have to code your site. The iPhone and a bunch of other windows mobile devices already offer this, however full html browsing is not yet available for some low-end phones. But Opera Mobile is making full html browsing easier and much more possible.