Thursday, April 30, 2009

Hey @treehugger help me out of the mobile iPhone landing page ghetto!

Now, I'm not singling out the awesome treehugger.com here, a lot of blogs are starting to do this; 

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"]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"]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.

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

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