RedTyger's Site-O-Matic
Unrestricted access. Wherever you are, however you browse.
RedTyger's Site-O-Matic was created in response to an unexpected appearance of mobile browers visiting this website. Generally speaking, using a mobile device to view a website that has not been specifically conditioned for the purpose will result in the website working poorly, if it works at all. Even if it did work, it would be plagued by expensive and lengthy page load times, erratic and illegible display and possibly failure of features and usability because of the expectation of available technology which is not common within mobile device fields. You may simply see an error or nothing at all.
The solution is the Site-O-Matic Mobile, which was built with the aim of allowing the entire website, both current and future versions, to be as fully functional and provide the same content on a mobile device as on a PC to allow customers and passing visitors alike as complete and as usable an experience as possible even when a PC is not available. Not just accessible, but optimised to improve your mobile experience as far as possible.
How it works and why it does what it does
There is no mobile website in the literal sense. The Site-O-Matic uses an algorithm to scan each page and rewrite the parts necessary into content and formatting suitable for a mobile device. This spans a much wider range of changes than appearance, from recreating tables as lists to splitting pages into smaller pieces to reduce bandwidth expenses and loading times for the browser. Not just compatibility and performance according to hardware ability, but allowing the user to gear the website up or down according to their preferences via the additional Site-O-Matic user options.
Suggestions are very welcome, you can post them in the feature request section of the Site-O-Matic tracker. Would you like me to take your website into the mobile internet? We can discuss it privately and securely via RedTyger or you can send me an email.
Test
You can examine the quality of the mobile conversion (or any other mobile website) using the tool below, provided by ready.mobi.
Screenshots
| Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | Screenshot 3 |
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| Nokia n70 browsing the text-only version. This is primarily a very fast and low bandwidth option. Images are described. | Motorola v3i with styling enabled. Images are removed to save bandwidth, but are available to view on demand. | Sony Ericsson k750i with images and styling enabled. Images larger than the screen are automatically resized to fit. |
Changelog
- Mobile site created, restricted to the main website pages only.
- Added the name! RedTyger Mobile is gone and the site as a whole is now just RedTyger, powered by RedTyger's Site-O-Matic.
- Added redtyger.mobi. All this does is redirect to redtyger.co.uk, it's really just a courtesy for mobile browsers who will look to .mobi to find a mobile website.
- Added compatibility to allow for third party software I or you may make use of on this website, such as the Discussion section.
- Added separate javascript, images and styling options.
- Added per-page bug reporting via the project bug tracker. Report a bug in just two clicks. You don't even need to type anything, if there's nothing that needs to be said! No reason it can't be used for non-mobile pages either.
- Added sitemode switch and saving of preferred sitemode.
- Added this page, to explain a little more about the idea.
- Added first/last page quick links to the pagination.
- Added page anchor capabitility. Page anchors are where a link direct you to a point elsewhere on the page you're currently viewing. When paginating for mobiles, they're no longer on the same page.
- Added additional page compression.
- Added minor optimisations.
- Changed the image replacement text to use the more descriptive image title text. It will fall back to the alt text as before if no title is available.
- Fixed forms breaking and preventing data submission.
- Fixed compatibility for multiple types of table on a page.
- Fixed incorrect pagination counts.
- Fixed speed issues, particularly when re-rendering tables.
- Fixed minor bugs.
- Removed mobile.redtyger.co.uk in preference of the sitemode switch and redtyger.mobi.
- Added ready.mobi testing form to this page.
- Changed pagination so that page content and tables are no longer paginated separately.
- Fixed incorrect markup error-checking fix.
- Fixed occasional inaccurate pagebit calculations.
Notes:
RedTyger Mobile uses XHTML Mobile Profile which should cater for mobile devices designed within the last few years and onward. A non-XHTML (pre-WAP 2.0) version of RedTyger is not planned.
The Site-O-Matic is proprietary and was entirely written by myself for this website except for the image resizing functionality, which uses the Wurfl device database, and an adaption of an accompanying image rendering library. Although you can use the mobile version on a desktop, images will not resize as the resizing dimensions are calculated from your mobile device's screen size.