Wordpress Trumps Blogger in Mobile

While I was waiting in a doctor's office today, I browsed Tweed on my Palm Pre. I clicked a link that took me to a blog post. In the past, this has taken me to some article that was designed to appear on a computer screen. The result is tiny text that I have to zoom in to see, and move the page back and forth to read--in short, it is cumbersome.

Today, however, I landed on a page that was perfectly optimized for my screen. It was a great experience. I was called in to see the doctor before I got a chance to see who the blog host was, but it got me curious about whether the big guys have all taken the time to optimize.

So I went to Vulgar Morality, a blog I know is hosted on wordpress. I was very impressed. Below is the main page.


The the beginning of the first post is visible, and if you want to continue read you click "read this post". The rest of the posts just display the title, date, author, and categories. You can contract the first post to this state by clicking the arrow on its top right. To get to the other posts, you expand them by clicking the arrow on their top right, and then clicking "read this post." Below is what the first post looks like if you click "read this post".


The design is perfect, or as close to it as could be reasonably expected. Wordpress gets the most words on the screen without making them too small to read.

Excited, I went to check out my other blog, Sophistpundit. Like Cloud Culture, Sophistpundit is hosted on Blogger. You can imagine my disappointment when I was greeted by the following:


It's basically the same page as the one you get looking at it from a computer.

Blogger is owned by Google. Google. How can they drop the ball on mobile like this?

All I can say is that they'd better get on this, and soon. Mobile readership is only going to get more important; it's only a matter of time before it begins to rival regular web readership. Blog platforms cannot afford to fall behind in this space. I'm very disappointed to discover that the one I've used for years now is lagging in this important area.

All I have to say is I hope they're already working on this.