When I am reading my favorite blogs via Google Reader, or any app for that matter, and I want to follow a story back to that blog from the RSS feed, I will sometimes get re-directed to a "mobile" version of the page.
This is not bad, in theory, but when the execution is wonky it's very frustrating. The latest is one of my favorite blogs, Treehugger!
Example:
[caption id="attachment_4388" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="Treehugger in Google Reader on an iPod Touch"]
[/caption]And I click through...
[caption id="attachment_4389" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="The landing site on Treehugger in Safari on the iPod Touch"]
[/caption]So I hit the mobile page, which would be cool but I don't hit the story. In fact I don't even see the story I wanted to expand on in this list. Auugh! Denied!
There are a couple of other reasons why this is frustrating.
- I'm coming in from an iPod Touch, so the layout won't be mangled even if I hit the regular full-browser site. Landing on the full site would still be plesant. (I also have a BlackBerry 8700r, but there isn't a site on earth that it can render properly).
- There's no option to just default to the regular site without being bounced to the mobile site. I believe Gawker has this option; it seems to set a cookie in your mobile browser saying "don't redirect this guy to the mobile site, he no like".
Of all the trivial things I can worry about, I'm worrying about this :) Mainly because I see it creeping in to every blog I read. Every site seems to want to bump you into a mobile version, but by and large the mobile version doesn't have the same polish that the regular site has.
From an end user perspective I'd rather suffer with a potentially mangled full site than a broken mobile site. I could probably find the story I was looking for at the Treehugger mobile landing page, but by the time I get to that page and realize I'm not looking at the story, then start calculating my options to get to that story I've forgotten what I want to read (yes, I'm a goldfish).
Please, Treehugger, fix it before I am fooled into buying a Hummer H2! I need my daily econews fix or bad things happen.
