Calfire.mobi is an idea for a mobile friendly site which helps get status updates to people on the ground in California. We've pulled data from inciweb.org, weather.com and CBS2.com as well as providing some useful phone numbers as suggested to us by those in the San Diego area…
Scripts were written in Perl using WWW::Mechanize to scrape sites and SQlite to do some quick and easy local storage. Weather data comes from weather.com using the Weather.com API and Weather::Com::Simple.
Development of the site was limited to 10 hours.
A couple of points about the front end development of the site:
- Using transparency in GIFs will stop the Opera Mini proxy (and possible other proxies) from converting your images to JPEG and corrupting them with artifacts from heavy compression.
- Using in-page links (<a href="#foo">) helps users skip through long pages, repeat the navigation at the head of each section and it's possible to navigate a long page in very few clicks.
- Long pages are good if they are easily navigable, total time to download is minimised (you can optimise content so the important stuff appears on one page saving the user from visiting 3 or 4 pages to find one phone number)
- Telephone numbers can be linked using the tel: uri scheme, if supported, when clicked the user should be prompted to confirm they want to call the number from the handset.
- Passing your offsite links through a mobile proxy such as Mowser is a quick and easy way of keeping content good for mobile
Hopefully I'll get to say more on front-end mobile web development in the future, but for now I'd really like to hear your thoughts on calfire.mobi.
🙂
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