These days, a huge swodge of blog reading is done on iPhones and other smartphones, and we all know how hard it can be to navigate a blog on one of these devices, flicking around the place to view pictures and such. So, if you are reading this blog post on YOUR smartphone, chances are you have noticed something about now. The Scodio Blog has magical inbuilt ability to completely transform itself to best fit whatever device you are reading it on! The same of course goes for www.ViewFromTheQuad.com, my podcast’s website. On the VFTQ site, there is even a way for iPhone users to stream episodes without having Safari open! (Hint: play an episode of VFTQ, and use the home button to exit out of Safari, not closing the Quicktime window that pops up.) Who says the iPhone can’t multitask?

First thing is first. It is important to recognise that this is actually quite an easy feat to accomplish. Like, crazy easy. It basically comes down to what plugins you use, and if you have a podcast, how you encode your media files.

Optimise site for iPhone and other Smartphones

First thing is first. You are going to want to make your site work with pretty much every smartphone out there. If you use WordPress, this is easily accomplished by installing the WPtouch plugin, developed by Brave New Code. They say this on the matter of the plugin: “WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or BlackBerry Storm touch mobile device.” It does all sorts of cool things, like formatting the site to Apple’s App Store design specs, allowing you to integrate your tweets, add one of those cool iPhone home screen iPhones for when people want to add your blog to their homescreen, like an actual app and it rescales your photographs and such. It’s wonderful! It even allows you to run Google Adsense, Google Analytics code and other custom code, and it works with 99% of WordPress apps that would be useful on a mobile device.

Get your media ready for background play on iPhones

If you are a podcaster using any kind of blog system which links to it’s media files directly in the posts (such as the wonderful and powerful Powerpress plugin for WordPress) that magical background playing I mentioned is probably already already working. If you aren’t linking to media files directly in your posts, start doing it. Now.

Note that you must be encoding your media in a format that iTunes recognises. So basically MP3 or AAC. But I don’t know of many podcasters who don’t encode in MP3 anyway, so you should be fine in this regard.

“But what if I don’t use WordPress, Cian?”

Well, I can offer a few ideas. If you use RapidWeaver, some themes such as many of those developed by NimbleHost come with cool inbuilt iPhone themes that make the website look wonderful on an iPhone and an Android based phone. For CMSes like Drupal, I took a quick look around but couldn’t find anything. If you handbuild your own sites, you probably don’t need this article.

Tags: android, blog, iPhone, plugins, smartphones, WPtouch

People often wonder exactly what runs the backend of my various wordpress installs, so I decided to give a full rundown of the wordpress backend as it in in the new View From The Quad redesign.

Firstly, this is what my plugins page looks like. Click to see this full screen.

Askimet

All wordpress users should be familiar with Askimet. It is quite simply put, the best anti-spam plugin out there. However, you need a wordpress.com account to run it. It can also be run on Drupal installs, as well as many other CMSes. I used it on various forum installs in my years.

Automatic Links

This one is a life-saver. Both my shows need a hell of a lot of links, and adding them all seperatly takes ages. Automatic Links does this for you, which makes me happy. It’s one all Podcasters with lots of links in their shownotes should use.

Feedburner Feedsmith

This just makes sure that when you subscribe to a feed, you get the feedburner redirect of the feed. Kind of useful, although since VFTQ and Scodio now only use wordpress as a backend, I’m suspicious as to how much work it actually does.

podPress

This is quite simply THE plugin for podcasting with WordPress. It rocks, in so many different ways. Want a premium RSS feed? You got it. Want to lock your feed? You got it. You HAVE to use this if you are a wordpress podcaster.

Twitter Tools

This allows the Scodio Twitter Account to update it’s followers any time ANY of my sites makes an update. It’s a pretty useful way to keep up with what happens here at Scodio Studios!

WordPress.com Stats

Nothing overly exciting here. Just stats.

WP-Amazon

Along with sponsorship, whenever I link to an Amazon product, my referell code gets stuck in there. Makes life easier.

WP-FLV

Never actually had to use this one. I wonder why I still have it… The site claims that it doesn’t even work anymore. I should really get rid of it…

WP-Super Cache

A great WordPress Caching plugin. My sites have never gone down due to an influx, and both VFTQ and SWoW have had pretty huge influxes of visitors out of the blue.

WPtouch iPhone Theme

Check out VFTQ or Scodio in your iPhone browser, and you will be plesently suprised. It looks all classy and clean.

Impressive, no?

So what wordpress plugins do you use? Let me know in the comments, and link back to your site so that we can take a look!

Tags: Askimet, Automatic Links, Feedburner Feedsmith, plugins, Podpress, Twitter tools, Wordpress, Wordpress.com Stats, WP-Amazon, WP-FLV, Wp-Super Cache, WPtouch iPhone Theme