Just added WPTouch to my blog. Awesome plugin for users who view your blog with a mobile device. Scroll down to the footer and check it out (on your mobile device of course :])

From WPTouch website:

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.

I Thought The IPhone/IPod Touch/Android Shows My
Website Just Fine The Way It Is Now?
Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

a. Each load was done with an iPhone running 3.0 software
b. Full signal bars for each network
c. mobileSafari’s cache and history were dumped for each load
d. Reflects load-time average of 3 consecutive loads for each network speed
e. BraveNewCode.com is a well-optimized site (minified javascript & css), most sites are not as optimized

Well, What If My Users Don’t Like It & Want To See My Regular Site?
There’s an option in the footer with WPtouch for your users to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your site’s regular appearance, with the choice saving a cookie for future visits— it’s that easy. We even automatically put a little snippet of code for the switch link into your current theme which will be shown only to mobile visitors, giving them control to choose between the two site views easily.

Will It Slow Down My Blog?
Not bloody likely! Unless of course you’re getting slammed with all sorts of traffic because you’ve installed this sexy thang. The theme package for WPtouch is small (700KB or so). It was designed to be as lightweight and speedy as possible, while still serving your site’s content in a richly presented way sparing no essential features like search, login, categories, tags and comments.

View full size image HERE.

Nik Cubrilovic
TechCrunch.com
A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as  ,  Pandora and  Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information, such as browser language and regional settings.

IP addresses are mapped to countries (and in some instances, further to states and cities) using large commercial datasets such as GeoIP from Maxmind, which is a ‘best guess’ database based on data it has collected (how, I would rather not know). The system is accurate enough to enable services to block on a country level, but often fail at a more local level.

But the nature of the web means that geographically restricting web services is next to impossible, because those who are technically adept have known how to find and use proxy servers (both open and private) and VPN services to masquerade as being from another country.

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