Note: See the newer version at: http://www.cantoni.org/2006/09/30/pdamobilewebsites.
I’ve started pulling together a collection of web sites that are optimized for small-screen devices such as PDAs. A few sites (like this one) are designed to be simple and degrade gracefully. Other more complicated sites usually create a special PDA optimized version of their site.
There are some similar link collections, but most that I’ve seen don’t do everything I’m looking for:
- The list of PDA optimized web site links must be updated frequently
- The PDA web sites must be current
- The PDA web sites must have true PDA friendly or PDA optimized content
Simply point your mobile device browser to http://cantoni.mobi/. In fact, set it as your home page in your mobile browser.
Although I am partial to Palm-branded devices, any Palm OS, Pocket PC, or other mobile device should work with these sites. Note: these are PDA optimized web sites created in HTML, not WAP sites which are more often used from a mobile phone.
Method
Currently, I’m storing my list of links in a Microsoft Access database. A Perl script queries the database and creates the HTML page which I manually FTP to the web server.
In the future, I’d like to set up a script to check the links regularly (perhaps twice a week) to make sure they are still valid and automatically update the file on cantoni.org. I’d also like to take a measurement of each page (including images) to see how “friendly” they really are. (Some sites still have an incredible amount of data which creates a real problem with a limited bandwidth device, especially when you pay by the byte.)