Everything worked out pretty well with the mobile site. Click this image and you can go see it for yourself.
So that’s now live. For some time I’ve been tinkering with a mobile version as a Monday project. But then I hit some snags with my ideas and life gets busy and you start making concessions to that or just going to sleep on time and you place on the back burner the mobile version of your website that everyone is just dying to see on their phones and tablets and what not.
You know how it goes.
But I started tinkering with it again yesterday, because in doing a few quick things elsewhere on the site I remembered ‘This was a project you’ve forgotten about.‘ Much to my chagrin.
This is all just a coding exercise, of course. An in-expensive hobby. And if there’s some utility to it for you or me, then even better.
It started in college. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year I was hanging out with a friend who had graduated, gone into the world and come back for grad school. He told me that if I learned to code I’d add $10,000 a year to my paycheck. So I had another friend, who was legitimately one of the smartest people any of us knew, help get me started while he was working as a student staffer in a computer lab. And, because I was cool I spent that summer learning things by trial and error.
This was, of course, back in the days when we used to code by hand, in Notepad. And I found a rhythm for making a few changes, saving the file, uploading it and refreshing pages that I liked. The trial-and-error of it was usually relaxing. The first guy in that anecdote is now a big shot economist and university lecturer. The second one, last I checked, was a successful salesman. And here I am. Coding was a part of my internship during college and an important part of my professional career for more than a dozen years. I am still waiting on those coding bonuses to show up in my checks.
Indeed, for more than four years it was a primary function of my work, back when al.com was a growing-out-of-being-a-secondary consideration. I was coding something everyday. And I was a journalist, what’s more. Probably there were a dozen or so people in the state who could do both back then. In my first interview there I made this tortured analogy about how I was a driver, more than a mechanic. I can take care of your car while you are abroad for a year or two, but you wouldn’t ask me to build you a race car from the ground up.
They hired me anyway.
Anyway, there’s a new mobile version. It’s responsive to size and which angle you are holding your phone in. And the secondary picture accidentally matches the primary photo, so now there’s a color scheme. Wish me luck keeping that consistent.
Elsewhere …
And your weekend plans? I’ll probably running. But what about you?
