Mobile browsing

When I analysed my HTTP log last week, I had another motive: are there enough people accessing my site on a mobile device? Or is it too small at this stage for me to care about?

Well, have a look at the numbers.

Yes, there are more people accessing my site through a mobile device than there are using Linux or OS X. That’s shocking!

Now, I’m not saying that this is representative of the rest of the world or anything, but at least it tells me a couple of things.

Firstly, the whole mobile browsing thing is bigger than I thought it was. I started worrying about this a couple of months ago and got myself a HTC s620 phone and a BlackBerry (for free, through some innovative social engineering and smooth talking). It really does get pretty useful on the move… which is frankly anywhere outside of the home and the office, and sometimes even within. (It’s handier to read recipes off the HTC than a laptop.) Google had caught on to the whole mobile browsing trend a very long time ago, and are rather well positioned to make use of it.

Secondly, it means that rather than worrying about my site working on Linux or OS X (i.e. worrying about what plugins to use), I should worry more about it working on mobile devices (i.e. small screen, no Javascript / CSS).

That’s a fairly big shift in my thinking. Earlier, I had been all for shifting all the processing to client-side Javascript. Now it appears I need to design more towards plain HTML pages generated by Perl / PHP.