Image by Purple Lime
Most of you are probably sick of hearing about the iPhone by now. But given that there is no escaping Apple-mania today, you might want to take half an hour to prep your blog for iPhone use.
Thankfully, it’s all very easy to do.
iPhone-Specific Theme Plugin
iWPhone is a WordPress plugin that serves a made-for-iPhone theme to anyone viewing your blog from an iPhone or iPod Touch.
You can see how the theme looks on Flickr.
But is the theme better than your regular blog theme?
In some cases, yes. Reading text off a colored background isn’t always a great experience at iPhone level, and given that very few people on a small screen are going to read your ads, there is little gain in showing them.
The iWPhone plugin provides a clean, simple interface that’s easy to read from. It also has a pretty cool feature where tapping anywhere on the content of an excerpt will load the post page.
However, the iPhone web browser is great. The vast majority of sites look great on the iPhone, and yours is probably one of them. If so, keep your custom design. It’s much more unique and much more memorable than the iPhone theme will ever be.
And the great browser is one of the main reasons people buy the iPhone; they want to see the real internet, not an “optimized” version.
In the end, you need to know how your current design looks on an iPhone. If it isn’t up to scratch, the iWPhone plugin is an easy way to fix it.
Create a Web-Clip Icon
Web-clips allow iPhone users to create a link to your web page on their dashboard.
To create a custom web clip icon for your blog, create an image that follows these rules:
- Square image. The iPhone adds the rounded corners itself, and adds a drop shadow effect.
- Has dimensions 57×57 pixels.
- Has no gloss effects. Again, the iPhone adds those itself.
Then simply upload it to the root folder of your site, with the name apple-touch-icon.png
The icon will then be used for every page on your site. If you want to have a different icon for a specific page in your site, you can do so by adding the following code to the page’s <head> section:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/custom_icon.png"/>
The official Apple documentation on this is here, and their advice for designing your icon is here. And you can see the Pro Blog Design icon here.
iPhone Blogging Apps
For the iPhone owners themselves; WordPress users should check out the official WordPress iPhone App.
At the minute it only covers writing and editing posts, but given that it was only announced yesterday, it has plenty of time to grow! I have my fingers crossed for comment moderation to be the next feature on the list.
The app will be released for free, for both wordpress.com and wordpress.org users, via the app store when it’s ready.
And for Typepad users (if you don’t already know!), Six Apart have a great free blogging app already available in the app store.
Preparing your blog for the iPhone is easy. Sadly, deciding whether or not to buy one isn’t. I can’t make up my mind! What do you think of it?
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Slevi (73 comments)11 July 08
For me the answer is no so far on buying one, a lack of storage space on it is one as with 16GB it won’t be a replacement for my iPod on which I have 14GB stored on music alone currently and still grows as I get more music. Let’s not even mention storing vids and such which add up quickly as well.
A second major downside is they picked a completely crappy provider here which abroad costs up to 30 Euro, roughly 45 USD per megabyte of internet usage. Woopie, every youtube video will end up costing you like 300 Euro to watch
. And as the only time I actually make more use of a phone is when I’m abroad, that simply aint a good deal 
.
Tested my blog design with the iphone viewers before and in landscape mode it appears to be working absolutely perfect, it cuts of straight where the sidebar begins so within one view you can read the entries
.
redwall_hp (134 comments)11 July 08
*Sigh* You beat me to it again…
Michael (18 comments)11 July 08
I really hope that the WordPress app eventually allows you to moderate comments. Another crazy idea, in September when the push notification service becomes available what if the WordPress app allowed you to get notified whenever there was a comment for moderation sent directly to your iPhone? That would be freaking cool!
Michael Martin (1285 comments)11 July 08
Slevi,
16GB would be enough space for me. It’s a lot of music still. But yeah, using the data plan in a foreign country is going to be really expensive.
In the UK, it’s £3 per megabyte for EU countries, and £6 outside the EU. You’d have to avoid using the data altogether.
Redwall,
lol – I won the race?
Michael,
That’s a great idea. Would be really useful and legitimate comments would spend much less time in the queue.
Brad (9 comments)11 July 08
Personally, I don’t see myself getting an Iphone. (even with the new 3G ones coming out in Canada)
I would rather carry my laptop with me on business trips and read something full screen rather than look at something that is 420×380? (I don’t know the resolution).
Or I can usually wait till I go home, or find a public internet cafe
Michael Martin (1285 comments)12 July 08
Brad,
Yeah, the small screen can’t really compare to a proper monitor. But for the times you don’t have a laptop with you, it could be a handy way to pass the time.
Brad (9 comments)14 July 08
Thats what a PSP or DS is for.
Michael Martin (1285 comments)15 July 08
Brad,
lol – Touché!
Tech magazine (2 comments)20 July 08
I’m using this plug-in on my blog but i want to have the same theme that i’m using now
Gilberto Galea (1 comments)21 September 08
I love Wordpress to write my blogs, I own one at Gilberto Galea Authority Blog, and now I’ve a chance to write with my iphone, It’s cool!,
I’ll install the soft to look how works.
Thanks for the tip,