in General, HowTo, Mobile, Mobile Site Generator, Tech

Mobile Site Generator

I’m really excited to launch a side project this morning that I’ve been working on for a while:

Mobile Site Generator

After filling out a form with page titles and few other bits of info, the generator spits out a fully functional mobile site (tested on iPhones, iTouches, and Android devices) ready for uploading to your server as an HTML file!

I’ve been asked a lot of questions about how we made the UNC Libraries’ mobile website. When I start to talk about the iUI framework we used, I see a lot of eyes glaze over. But it’s really easy! I’m not an expert coder, honest, and I made it work. Anyone who has basic familiarity with web development and a little time on their hands to puzzle out a few details can use iUI.

But while I’ve seen a lot of talk about mobile sites for libraries, I don’t see nearly as many actually implementing them. I think a lot of librarians are intimidated. But IUI’s code is actually so simple that I was able to automate its creation! The Mobile Site Generator will hopefully help people over the first hurdle: it creates a framework for a mobile site that you can then tweak & customize to you heart’s content.

As you’ll no doubt see immediately after clicking the link above, the MSG (gee, what a great acronym I picked!) has an interface that’s… shall we say less than ideal 🙂 I plan on making it prettier with time, but I wanted to get it functional and online in time to point it out in some presentations I’m giving in the near future.

There’s more information on what the generator does over on the MSG page. I welcome your comments and suggestions! You can leave comments here, on the MSG page itself, or just e-mail me.