Trying out options for a possible mobile version

If any of you have been browsing my site in the last few days, then you probably noticed the theme changed several times. The reason is that I’m trying out options for a possible mobile version of the site.

I was checking the statistics from the beginning of the year and I noticed that about 11,000 visits came from mobile devices. That’s not a big number for most sites, but with the traffic I’ve been getting lately that’s a huge difference compared to last year’s data. That made me think that the full site might not be the best solution for mobile devices, mostly smartphones, specially with the ads and all.

Out of the many themes that I tried, the ones I wanted the most had problems displaying the images. They are both built around jQuery, with one of them being in alpha stage (according to the author). The one in alpha stage is awesome, it handles resizing videos really well, but not so much with the pictures. They would sometimes show up in the right size, but others in full size, with the added problem of the full sized picture only displaying about half of it because the theme would lock up the screen.

The one I’m going for handles the pictures really well, but not the videos. It’s not built for speed, but it’s not slow either. For that I had to install a plugin that resizes most videos, except the ones I embedded using a certain youtube plugin, which sucks because I now have to go and fix about 450 videos…

Anyway, the point of this entry is to let you know that I’m trying several things with the site and that’s the reason it suddenly changes theme without warning.

If I get it to work properly I’ll post a simple tutorial for those of you running your own WordPress installation who either don’t know or don’t want to deal with more complicated solutions.