Thank you Dave Winer: now I can read TechCrunch on my cell phone!

by on August 18, 2006

I was having breakfast with Guy Kawasaki when Dave Winer called. I hit ignore cause it’s rude to talk on the phone when you’re having breakfast. Anyway, when the breakfast was done I listened to the voice mail where Dave told me about a little experiment of his http://techcrunch.scripting.com (try it on your mobile phone, compare to the original TechCrunch).

Now, a little bit about that first. A few days ago I was complaining to Dave about various bloggers who make their blogs impossible to read on cell phones. TechCrunch was one of the worst. It takes two minutes to load and even then it isn’t really usable due to having to scroll around the navigation stuff.

So, what did Dave do? He said that he could give me a server-side-RSS version.

This rocks. Rocks. Rocks. Now I can read TechCrunch while walking around tonight’s TechCrunch party.

I hope Dave wraps up this server-side aggregator and gets every blogger to implement it so I can read every blog on my phone.

Thanks Dave for scratching my itch.

  • Women Want
    I like your opinion, anyway,.
    and I like your blog too,.... :)
  • Discount rental: payless rental
  • I thought thats why we have RSS? Why do you need to got to techcrunch.com to read it. Why not subscribe to its RSS feed in your mobile phone's RSS reader. Surely it much have one.
  • Brandon
    True enough. Never eat alone.
  • Brandon: good point. But, why do cool people invite me to breakfast? Cause they know I'll drop their names. It's sorta like PayPerPost except breakfastperpost! :-)
  • Brandon
    does anybody else get tired of robert's name dropping? tell me how guy kawasaki helped stregthen the main idea of this post? yeah, robert, we know you are graced with internet celebreties. you've got readership, you've already won us over and we've subscribed because we think you're relevant. but the more someone advertises their own importance, the quicker they loose it. the slope is slippery.
  • Hi Robert,

    Micro Persuasion just linked to xfruits.com, a Mashup RSS creation service with a RSS to Mobile feature.

    What I liked:

    - Easy to sign up.

    - Forgot to add my exact RSS feed URL (just the .com domain) when testing out the mobile feed, but the service found it anyway. It looks like it was able to phrase the page and find the correct rss address.

    - Presents the different features of the site into easy to understand boxes on the homepage. Makes it
    easy for users to understand what each feature is about.

    What I would add:

    - A feature to email or text message the url to a mobile phone. The url is a little long for people that would have to T9 the address.
  • Ed
    This is such old news...
  • Surprised no one has mentioned that Newsgator has a very phone-friendly version of their newsreader. Yet another reason to love Newsgator - all your RSS feeds, complete with read/unread status, synced across a web client, a mobile-optimized web client, an Outlook client, and full Windows (FeedReader) and Mac (NewsGator) clients. Yummy!

    I've been using it since I got a RAZR & loaded Opera Mini last fall (though it works fine with lamer default phone browsers as well) for fairly heavy blog surfing.

    But I get sad when I visit another blog site linked from it; then I have to put up with blogs that aren't very usable on a phone browser as Scoble originally complained. I agree: if I can't read your post easily on my phone, I will probably just shrug and hit the back button.
  • This is very much an issue of Web standards, which Winer doesn’t care about or understand but will inevitably claim to have invented.
  • I read this post on Google Reader Mobile...very concise, works on the smallest phones.
    http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/

    I like the script idea though, not just for blogs though. I think most sites are going to need to address the way they look in mobile devices. For some sites, I have to search them through the Google mobile homepage, which proxies the request through their servers and breaks something that would otherwise be unreadable into digestable content.
  • danja
    Today's headline: "A-list blogger invents the wheel".


    Here's an RSS-derived lite view of TechCrunch using an existing free, general-purpose, standards-based online tool. I didn't have to write a line of code. You can use the same technique for any feed you like - here's yours.

    (The XSLT might not be ideal, but it was the first I found with Google).
  • JT
    Daves site takes forever to load on my HTC Wizard. Just use an online RSS feeder or something and subscribe to the techcrunch rss feed. I used feeddemon and newsgator mobile, both from newsgator.com. This way my feeds are synchronized and I'm not reading the same thing twice.
  • Ok, I decided I'm not waiting for Dave to share with the world. I made my own. You can use it for most any site out there and you can find it here: http://hellyeahbitch.com/mobile

    Just plug in the base URL (for example hellyeahbitch.com) and chose if you want styling on my interface and whether or not you want to see HTML in the posts pulled and you are done.

    About Bloglines Mobile...I tried using it, and I wasn't a huge fan. I don't like having to add feeds and all the options of marking it "read" and blah blah blah. I just want something simple to view a blog in a format for my mobile screen nothing more.

    More information at my blog post: http://hellyeahbitch.com/archives/2006/08/182214

    Frankly, if no one else uses it but me, its cool because I made it for me, but I would love to hear if anyone is using it and what they think.
  • I'm waiting for a Seattle ferry and am on my BlackBerry 7100t, the site works fine, the graphic is there, the ads are there, the comments work, who needs the other stuff?

    I checked out my blog too and no issues there either.....
  • Congratulations, Dave. You just invented Bloglines Mobile. ;-)

    I've been using (and loving) Bloglines (a web based aggregator) for years for this very reason - they have a very usable, lightweight mobile version of their web-based aggregator that works great on Windows Mobile devices. So, I can (and do) read a mobile-friendly, RSS-based version of any of my 1000 RSS subscriptions anywhere and anytime I want.

    People pooh pooh-ed the fact that "Bloglines doesn't work offline, like Aggregator X does" for a long time. But now that more and more people (like you, Robert, and Dave) are getting and using mobile connected devices, they are starting to realize how cool it is to be connected to your favorite sites via RSS no matter where you are, and starting to see that as a valid tradeoff for not being able to read offline.

    Welcome to the mobile RSS world! :-)
  • Anonymous, if you meant my age was gigantic and had images then you did not have the full URL as it is a stripped view with NO images full link Includes the /m in the url
    http://www.mikeysgblog.com/m is the mobile url
  • But the mobile version is stripped of advertising! Won't someone please think of the poor advertisers! ;D
  • Robert, your site does work fine on my phone too. However, my point was that site owners could use a stylesheet targeted for mobile users to get rid of the "crap" and let their content shine through. That way, they could specifically target mobile users and show them content that isn't necessarily restricted to what's published in their feed.

    In any case, a server-side mobile RSS renderer is still very cool. BlogLines Mobile (http://bloglines.com/mobile) remains my favorite though :)
  • Anonymous
    That page has is gigantic. Luckily I'm on EDGE. There should be an option to turn off images.
  • Okay so ther isn't much worth reading on my blog but all my worthless drivel is still readable on a cell phone at http://www.mikeysgblog.com/m
    The added /m for mobile is an out of the box SharePoint 2007 feature. This last week I blogged about the whole mobile blog experience (both reading and posting) while on vacation
  • seems like you can accomplish the same thing using skweezer's or google's transcoding services...

    definitely psyched to see the interest in RSS on mobile. nice!

    -kevin
  • One of my concerns about the TechCrunch party is that if all the top-notch bloggers are in one location at the same time, doesn't that mean that the very fabric of the blogosphere will collapse? And isn't there a security issue around having all of you in one area at the same time? Who are 2nd and 3rd in command at TechCrunch and Scobleizer, and have they been deputized?
  • Paulo: my site works just fine on all cell phones and you don't need to do any of that crap. But I still like this serverside RSS display. It gets rid of all the crap other than just the content. For a small screen this makes Web reading FAR better.
  • I'm in love.

    I need this for all of my favorite sites (including my own)! I just got a T-Mobile MDA Windows Mobile Phone and I love it so far. (Surprise! I'm a Mac guy.) The problem is, that all sites are horrible to read and although I have a good RSS reader on there (prssreader: http://pda.jasnapaka.com/prssr/) I don't want 1000 feeds going to my phone, so I'm left trying to read sites beautifully styled for a monitor, not for a cell phone.

    I'm giving Dave this weekend to start passing out code I can use or I'm off to make one myself!
  • Thats a pretty cool hack. However, if the sites themselves used valid XHTML and a CSS stylesheet designed for mobile devices, they would degrade gracefully for mobile users.

    Until then you could always let Opera do the work and use Opera Mini (http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/operamini/) if your phone supports Java.
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