Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Mobile-friendly web page

Decided it's time to make my websites mobile-friendly, since Google seems to consider that important these days. So I ran the tester at
which identified about 30 errors, including "Links too close together" and "Text too small to read" on multiple items. The latter error is particularly interesting because I typically use not-too-fancy html+css, and I don't set the font size anywhere. One of the main features of html is the separation of content and presentation, so decently written html should not require much tweaking for different displays. The html markup tells what things are, and the browser should be able to figure out a reasonable way of displaying those things.

After a little digging, I found the first step in mobilifying a web page is to add the magic incantation:
  •  <meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
to the <head> section of the html file.

As it turns out, that's the last step as well: All the other error messages went away when I added that one line. As I understand it, that line basically tells the browser "just use html the way it's intended to be used" and then everything is fine.

Reorganizing this blog.

I decided it's time to reorganize the domain name setup for this blog. Previously, it was accessible via two web addresses:
 One side effect of this setup is that the blog's cookies are set up under my sensicomm.com domain. I decided that I don't like the idea of scripts that I didn't write and don't control running under  the identity of a domain that I do control.

So in the new setup this blog is still accessible and will appear unchanged using the blogspot address. The sensicomm address contains static copies of all previous postings, but not any comments made on those postings.

If you have a web site containing a like to an old blog post, you might want to update the link. For example,
  1. http://blog.sensicomm.com/2015/09/pebble-watch-programming.html
  2. http://sensicomm.blogspot.com/2015/09/pebble-watch-programming.html
The old address of this post[1] now points to the static copy of that post, while the new address[2] contains both the post and any comments.