Mobilize your site for free with Mowser, FeedM8 or Mippin Maker

So you have your wonderful site or blog and you're proud of it. You're happy with the way it looks on a computer.

But wait. What if your readers want to access it from their mobile phones?

Sure, the S60 Browser for example renders pages more or less exactly like they are seen on a computer. But what if your readers don't own an S60 smartphone? What if they want to view your site on a razr? Or through Internet Explorer mobile?

Luckily, there are many services that help you 'mobilize' content. Few are free, though. Here are my thoughts on what I think are the Top 3 free mobilization services.

Mowser

Mowser mobilizes the web by taking HTML pages normally viewed on a PC and adapting them so they work on a mobile phone. You can use it by going to Mowser.com on your phone and entering the URL of the site you wish to visit. You can even bookmark a certain site you view through Mowser, since the mobilized URLs have permalinks. A service that works in a very similar way is Skweezer.
Nice and useful if you are stuck with a mobile browser that predates the 3rd Millennium.

What if you're a webmaster or blogger?

Well, if you have your own domain you can map the m. subdomain to Mowser. Meaning that your readers can then go to m.yourdomain.com and automatically view the mobilized version of your site. Even better is that any external links in the adapted pages go through Mowser as they normally do, but any links to your own domain stay as m.yourdomain.com. Which means that if a post entitled "Test Post" on your blog normally has the address www.yourdomain.com/something/testpost, its mobile version will be m.yourdomain.com/something/testpost. And again, these are permalinks, they can be bookmarked and the address stays the same.

Click here for instructions on how to map the m. subdomain to point to the mobilized-by-Mowser version of your site. You can also add an additional header to your HTML pages to inform search indexes about your mobile version as described here.

If you have a hosted Wordpress blog there are many mobilization options, I am aware. Mowser also have their own Wordpress plugin, available here.

To get an idea of how a certain web page looks when mobilized by Mowser, just go to the Mowser site on your computer and enter the URL.

FeedM8

FeedM8 has a different approach to mobilization. It grabs your site's RSS feed and creates a mobile site out of it. The mobile site you create using this method will have its own www.feedm8.com/yourchoice URL. You can customize the look and feel of your mobile site and all. I came across one major disadvantage while trying this service: download links simply don't work. As in, they're not shown as links at all. Weird. But this still is a service worth a look, if you don't usually have download links on your blog or site.

A very neat feature of FeedM8 is Text Alerts. For your readers who live in the US or Canada, here is yet another option for staying up-to-date with your content: yes, text messages. Depending on the type of information you're delivering, you can offer your readers all updates, updates for select keywords, or updates based on user specified keywords. If a keyword is selected, the user will only receive an alert if the new content contains the keyword. The deployment of the text messages is free. For you, at least.

Mippin Maker

Mippin Maker is similar to FeedM8, in that it fetches your RSS feed to create the mobile site. The URL of your mobile site will be mippin.com/yourchoice. Customization options are there, and furthermore, if you have an AdMob account, you can tie that to your mobile site, and Mippin Maker will serve ads that you receive the revenue for.

Also noteworthy is that the parent company, Mippin, has a mobile personalized homepage service available at Mippin.com (when accessed on a mobile device) and a mobile site search engine. If you use Mippin Maker to mobilize your site, the mobilized version will show up in Mippin search results. Mippin.com was reviewed by All About Symbian here and here.

Sadly, external links are only available if you choose to view the original (non-mobilized) page. At least you get this option, unlike with FeedM8.

Final thoughts

The fact that I use Mowser for the mobilized version of S60 Info says it all. I tried FeedM8, but its lack of external links was a deal breaker for me. And even if Mippin Maker does give you a "View original page" option at the end of each post, I strongly believe that external links should be shown inside each post, exactly where they are on the 'normal' version of the page.

However. If you haven't yet created a mobile version of your site or blog, I strongly encourage you to. It will make the lives of your readers much easier. And do check out all of these free options, you won't know for sure which best suits you until you try them all (except if, like me, you must have links shown inside your posts).

[UPDATE]

As you can see from the Comments section, Scott from Mippin wrote that they will be enabling external links in a few weeks. Whenever this happens, I will give Mippin Maker another try and will definitely post my experience.

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