Do you read Anna Raccoon on an iPhone or other Smartphone?
We’re taking a quick look at whether the site is easy to follow on Smartphones, and we’d welcome comments on how well the existing setup works.
For example, is our RSS feed easy to follow and click through to the site from, or should we be looking at doing a Full Feed? That is, should the feed carry entire articles rather than just a snippet as at present.
How do you read the site on your Smartphone? Can we make this easier? Do we perhaps need our own iPhone or Android App.
As a test, I’ve created a bloapp iPhone App for Anna Raccoon, which gives the site looking roughly like this:
- Anna Raccoon Bloapp Screenshot
The header image looks distorted in the screenshot, but it’s precisely the dimensions specified.
If you would like to try out this App, you can access it via iTunes:
Anna Raccoon has the following QR Code (if you don’t know what that means, you probably don’t need to worry about it).
We’ve also done various minor tweaks, such as adding a small section of “Essential Reading” links to highlight some articles from here and elsewhere, and creating a @raccoontage Twitter Feed which Tweets whenever a comment is made.
Comments and suggestions are most welcome.
Matt Wardman blogs at The Wardman Wire, on media, politics and technology, in addition to writing at the Raccoon Arms. Follow me on Twitter.
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Full article in feed would be great. Can’t click through from an RSS reader when you’re on the tube underground.
I would prefer to read a full feed, since I use google reader, and that means sometimes, when the snippet doesn’t properly describe the article within, I miss articles which are right up my street, since opening the page requires loading time, a new tab, etc.
I can’t read everything, but on other feeds where the full text is available, I can skip past some introductory paragraphs and get a feel for the piece to see whether to start from the beginning again or not, and I find I read a lot more articles on those feeds in full…
Me too. I would prefer the full text, rather than the summary.
Another aye for full feed.. Most blogs that only do snippets I never read and end up deleting when I have a blog cull. AR obviously worth the click through.
Will it work on a Nokia 3210?
@Michael
If you mean one of these, like my backup phone:
Then it only works if you phone someone up and get them to read it out to you.
(Reblogged from here:
http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2009/06/27/me-and-my-steam-powered-mobile-phone-we-are-very-happy-together/ )
Gosh Matt, that’s a really up to date Nokia, I must get one of those, my old thing is looking very old fashioned these days…
Geek that I am and working at the leading edge of technology, my phone is this one.
And mine is the one before that! The main thing is I can make calls with it which I think is the object of a portable phone.
That looks like a publicity shot not your real phone.
I call fraud.
Mine has the Telegraph’s Expenses Duckhouse Duck next to it for scale.
I don’t use a phone to access the site but I sometimes use my eDGe* tablet (Android based). Now that I have turned off javascript in the default browser the site displays as I would expect it to.
* eDGe tablet is in fact a 9.7″ e-ink and a 10.1 LCD that fold together like a book.
However, being serious for a moment, it looks like we need to take a proper look at full-feeds.
There are a couple of issues to think about, so it’ll take a few days.
I read the blog mostly on an Android smartphone, thru NewsRob app.
I too would appreciate a full feed for the smartphone and my Vista laptop, thru Google Reader, where I have to click your blog (but not most of the others I have) across to a new tab.
The full story in the feed. Thats cool, but keep the graphics light on the link as i like reading the comments too. Heavy graphics means crash stupid phone browser, which is opera mini by the way. Several blogs, ambush predator for one, i have to turn the graphics off in opera to view the comments.
That’s useful.
Any suggestions as to how to keep graphics light?
There may be a tweak or two in Thesis, I suppose.
Do you mean the occasional image I put up, or the background ‘theme’?
Hello Julia. Problems first appeared loading your blog when the design changed a year or so ago. It may well be the background image. Your well worth the fiddling about though. The phone I’m using is an LG kc910, and I would’t consider it to be smart at anything.
I often read the site on my iPhone when out and about – works perfectly in Safari, no problems with it at all, unlike some other sites.
I wonder if that might be because AR uses a professionally developed theme, Thesis, which has had real money spent developing it.
(before I get jumped on, that’s not saying that free themes are bad – I use the Theme Hybrid framework myself.)
Full feed please, not that I don’t like coming to the site, but I can sneak a read at work on an RSS feed through Google Reader without the lovely raccoon banner drawing attention
I read the site on my Android, using Pulse reader. I have a poor data connection near where I live (one of the perils of living on the edge of a common) so if I do click through to the story it can mean a long wait as the page loads, so I would prefer a full feed if possible. It would certainly get me reading more
A few things we need to think about when switching to a full feed.
Scrapers. Full feeds make it easier for your site to be spidered and reposted routinely.
Copyright statement at the bottom.
Images. A feature of AR is careful use of images (example). We need to decide what to pass through to the full feed, whether the full post image, a thumbnailed version, or nothing.
Stats – some tweaks would be needed.
Another for full feed, always annoying when I can’t read in full immediately but I always persevere with the raccoon!
I would like to see an Android app for the Anna Raccoon RSS feed..
That’s the law of Sod, or Murphy, or something, that is.
We produce one for an experiment and the only person who asks wants the other one…
Watch this space.
Full feed please. I hardly o ever read the blogs that don’t use it, it’s laziness I know but there you go.
I do click through to yours, and Samizdata because I like to read the comments… but other blogs not so much. And I do tend to ‘mark as read’ a lot of posts without reading on all the blogs that require me to click through, your included.
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