If you’re anything like me, you may have asked yourself the question; “How do I make my Wordpress blog available for users with a mobile phone?”. Well, I did after I visited my blog with my mobile phone. Okay, it still looked good but was no where near mobile phone friendly. The sheer size of the blog, all the extraneous content, heavy images etc made the blog rather hard to load. And lets face it, size matters when it comes to mobile phones. Not only because of the screen size on most phones devices, but also the fact that surfing using a mobile tends to be quite expensive.

Here many of you may think that making your blog accessible for mobile phones is a hard, rather long winded task. But fear not, it’s actually very very easy thanks to the work of Alex King. Alex King is an excellent Wordpress plugin developer, who has developed quite a few plugins, many of whom I use on this blog. The plugin in question is the excellent Wordpress Mobile Edition. With this nifty plugin, you will have your blog available for mobile phones in a matter of minutes, saving both you and the readers of your blog precious bandwidth.

To get this plugin installed, just follow these simple steps. SSH into your account, and go to your plugins folder, which should be in ~/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/.

wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip
unzip wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip
rm wordpress-mobile-edition.2.1.1.zip

Then go to your blog’s admin plugins page, and enable the plugin there. If everything goes according to plan, your plugin should now be activated. What next you might ask yourself? Haha, I hate to disappoint you but that’s it. Nothing more to be done, as no configuration is needed. Now all you have to do is fire up your mobile phone browser, and point it to your blog. You should now get a nice bandwidth friendly version of your blog. Enjoy!

As some of you may know, I’m attending as crew at a large computer party in Norway this easter called The Gathering. I just arrived after a two hour train trip, which was spent on IRC and sending off a few e-mails using my cell phone over GPRS. The party has almost 5000 people attending, and a good 200 people responsible for making the party happen. In just under 24 hours, the Vikingship will start to fill up with enthusiastic computer nerds of all ages, to attend the party for five full days. It will be a party filled with all types of different elements, that make up the computer scene as we know it.

You will have professional gaming tournaments, music competitions and the genre I love the most; demo making. For those of you that don’t know what demo coding is, I can sum it up with this definition. Think of a music video, think of computers games and 3D environments, add those two together and you have yourself a demo. A demo is a program that displays lovely graphics, stretched to the extremes of what is possible with todays technology added with catch, groovy music tracks. It’s all meant to entertain, and to amaze you of what can be done with today’s 3D accelerator cards.

Of course, an event of this size does attract quite a few people with vast computer knowledge, so the whole hall sizzles with people with good know how. For those that are interested, it’s a great chance to get to learn new stuff and to expand your social network. And this is the greatest aspect of the event itself, the chance to meet up with likely spirited people that love the same stuff that you do. And of course, with the way the internet works, you actually get to meet those people you chat with online that live too far away from you to meet on a regular basis. An event like this erases the borders that you have on a day to day basis. It’s just great to be with people that love the same stuff as you do, namely computers! It’s gonna be a great five days and I can’t wait to keep you up to date. And here’s a sneak peek of how the hall looks, just to get a feel of how it is.

I’ve had quite a few problems connecting to the net via my cell phone, the Sony Ericsson T630. It connected nicely to the net, got its IP address from the DHCP server and right DNS settings. But it seemed that the requests didn’t go any further than the gateway, and stopped there. So all settings seemed ok, but the packets just met the wall.

After doing some research I finally found out why. Under the account settings for GPRS, the access point was meant to be ‘internet’ instead of ‘wap‘. After making that change, everything worked without a problem. Ok, I have to admit the speeds were terrible! Abysmal to say the least, but what else can you expect when you’re used to broadband on a daily basis. It’s not like speed are important anyway, the only reason you do connect via wireless is because you need to. You might be expecting an important e-mail, or you’re waiting to settle an important bid on an ongoing auction. The reasons could be many, and it’s nice to be able to do your stuff wherever you are, as long as you have your laptop and cell phone handy.