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!

This is one of those posts that I know will have a very limited audience. To the left, you see a block with random BOFH quotes, which I find rather amusing. I’ve always found them entertaining, and thought that they would make a nice addition to my blog as sheer entertainment for you guys. A while back, I found this great little plugin called XmasB quotes, that adds a widget to WordPress where it displays random quotes. The actual quotes are stored in the same MySQL database as Wordpress. But then comes the issue that I faced. There are well over 400 of those quotes, and manually copy and pasting all those quotes into the admin interface of XmasB was not an option that seemed tempting. Not one bit. Now how could I solve that?

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