« Find a better deal with BadCreditOffers.com | Home | Clean your garage with CarGuyGarage.com »
Mobile-ize your blog with MoFuse
By Michael Lundberg | October 27, 2007
I just got access to a new beta site that is attempting to do for mobile sites for what Feedburner did for RSS feeds. The site is called Mobile Fusion, or MoFuse for short. It only takes a few minutes to setup. Once you login, you create a mobile site, which is done by pointing MoFuse to your site’s RSS feed. I run my RSS feed through FeedBurner, and it had no problem at all reading the feed. MoFuse then creates a new feed that is applicable to mobile browsers, like my boring BlackBerry Curve. The new feed is stripped down to the bare minimum, removing all the pictures, flash, and anything else you had on your site that doesn’t easily translate to a mobile browser. Once that’s done, you can create up to 2 other (correction: you can create more than 3 pages with MoFuse) additional pages for your mobile feed, which MoFuse suggests that you use for a “Contact Us” page or a “About Us” page. You create these pages right inside your MoFuse account and it allows the use of some HTML mark ups. Me being the lazy bum that I am, opted not to create any additional pages. The another option that you have is turning on Google AdSense on your site. If you do turn it on, you can select to put the banner at the top of your page or the bottom and you must agree to split half the revenue with MoFuse. You enter your Google AdSense account ID and MoFuse randomly serves half the ad impressions with your Google AdSense ID and the other half with their own AdSense ID. I think this is a great idea and compromise, especially since MoFuse is providing a free service. The last feature you can add is a bit of code (which MoFuse autogenerates for you, specifically for your blog software) that autodirects mobile browsers to your MoFusion mobile feed. I was afraid that the code wouldn’t properly detect some browsers and accidentally deliver the wrong content, so I decided not to use this code. Instead, I included a mobile badge button, so that those users who want to actually see the full site on a mobile browser can do it, as long as they don’t mind waiting for that initial page to load up on their cell phone.
Some drawbacks that I noticed:
MoFuse doesn’t provide the whole article content. It only provides about 1.5 mobile screens worth of your content. A full service site should aim to serve the entire article, even if it has to split that article up into multiple mobile screens or even scrolling screens. Hopefully, they will begin providing full mobile articles once the site gets out of private beta.Correction: MoFuse most definitely provides the entire article in the mobile version of your site!
- Google AdSense didn’t seem to be working when I browsed my site from my phone. It did work when I used the preview function within MoFuse.
Despite these two small issues, I found the site very easy to use. In particular, I liked that they share the Google AdSense feature, rather than just serve up their own mobile ads on your site.
Let me a comment below, if you’re interested in giving the service a try. MoFuse is an invitation-only service, but I have 50 free invitations to give out. Request an invite, even if you only want to play with it, I’ve got MoFuse invitations to spare!
October 27th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Hey Michael,
MoFuse displays the full feed content and you can add more than 3 pages.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:09 am
@ David Berube - I stand corrected! Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I just checked the mobile version of my site and it does include the entire article. Very nice.
However, Google ads are not currently served up when I view my mobile site on my phone (Blackberry Curve). Interestingly, I can see the Google ads when I preview my page within the MoFuse configuration screens.
I’m sure that will get worked out soon. After all, that’s why it’s called beta.
I’ll continue to follow MoFuse’s service. It could easily become the next Feedburner-like service. And we all know who acquired Feedburner (hint: it rhymes with Hoogle).
Thanks for the comments,
Michael Lundberg
http://www.michaellundberg.com