Lighter Forum pages, or mobile version ?

[fpp]

Hi,

ITT is the site I use most often for my 770 news, and the Forum is the part I visit daily (sometimes more :-) for support, new software and ideas, etc. Of course I regularly do this on the 770 itself.

The paradox is that, for a site of interest only to users of a specific mobile device, it doesn't feel very optimized for that device's limitations (apart from displaying acceptably in 800px wide) and is a bit rendering-heavy (graphics, CSS, tables etc.).

On the 770 it takes quite a while for an entire page to download and rearrange itself (shuffling itself around a few times) before settling down.

This is especially troublesome in the Forum itself, because it takes forever to go back and forth between the forums list, the topics list, and the posts themselves. Moreover, the image at the top of each page, at 100px height, takes up 25% of a (maximized) browser window. That, plus the site menu bar, plus the navigation line, plus the forum menu frame, plus a generous serving of vertical whitespace, makes the entire first screen of each forum page mostly useless (or at least contentless), which makes for additional vertical scrolling.

I would really like to have much lighter pages in the Forum, with a greatly reduced background image and a more tightly packed design, vertically...

Alternatively, maybe ITT could have a totally different front-end for browsing with mobile devices, like in Gmail or Slashdot do. To illustrate, below are two views of the forums on another site about PDAs (also powered by vBulletin) - it's in French but you get the idea:
http://www.pdafrance.com/pdaforum/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=64
http://www.pdafrance.com/pdaforum/?styleid=12

TIA,
fp

[Mike Cane]

Live via 770:

Some speedbumps are from those tiny ads loading from another server.

You make a good point. To save forums to read offline, I do Thread Tools->Printable View.

[bigboote]

While on the subject of upgrades to the ITT site:

PLEASE enhance your search page!

Currently when you search for a phrase, you don't get specific posts, but a whole message thread, which you then have to wade through to find what you want. I (and probably many others) use the ITT forums as a 770 information repository (on and off my 770), and it would be nice to be able to, for example, quickly find that explanation of how to add root to the file browser.

John

[gnuite]

While on the subject of upgrades to the ITT site:

PLEASE enhance your search page!

Currently when you search for a phrase, you don't get specific posts, but a whole message thread, which you then have to wade through to find what you want. I (and probably many others) use the ITT forums as a 770 information repository (on and off my 770), and it would be nice to be able to, for example, quickly find that explanation of how to add root to the file browser.

John

You can search on a post-by-post basis in the Advanced Search page (near the bottom of the form, labeled "Show Results as".

That said, I agree that these forums are a little bit of a pain to navigate on the 770. Having to reload the page every time I go "Back" only magnifies the problem. Is there a setting in Opera to avoid this? Or on the ITT web server, perhaps?

Also, the site is always just a little bit wider than 800 pixels, so there is always a horizontal scroll bar, even in full-screen mode. ITT's isn't the only website that does that, too, so I don't know if it's ITT's fault or Opera's fault, but it's annoying.

But hey, sofa-surfing ITT on the 770 is better than nothing.

[fpp]

So, is there any hope, or is no one even reading this anyway ? ;-)

[Reggie]

As of now, we don't have a functional mobile version of the forums. If you want, you can view the forums via its arrchive which can be displayed in PDA (mobile) format:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/archive

Thanks.

[lpotter]

google has an interface to make any web page formatted into a mobile sized site:
Just enter the url into the form on this page:
http://www.google.com/gwt/n

[Reggie]

Ok, we've installed a mobile version template for the forums. It is fully functional -- you can post and reply, and access your private messages. Point your 770 browser to:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/?styleid=3

or select "PDA Style" at the lower left of any forum page.

You can always switch to the regular style by selecting "Default Style".

Enjoy. :D

[fpp]

Wow, that was fast ! Thanks Reggie for listening and acting on it... now the forums are blazingly fast on the 770.. :-)

Now, if I may push my luck I'd like to offer the following feedback :

The new pages are maybe a little *too* bare -- not visually, but in the sense that there is no indicator left anymore of which forums have new posts (in the forum list page), or in which threads those posts reside (in a forum's thread list page). This makes difficult if not impossible to follow the forum's activity...
If you recall that mobile version of vBulletin on the french site I posted up there, it has very bare pages also, with only two pictograms : a red check mark for forums with new posts, and a button-with-down-arrow for threads with new posts. Works very well in practice (also very useful : links to page numbers for those loooong MikeCane threads :-).

Another way of solving the issue is through the "new posts" query : after posting the first message I had taken to using it as my "entry page" to the forums through a bookmark -- it shows only what you need to catch up on and saves a lot of back-and-forth and page reloads.
Unfortunately in mobile mode there is no link to it anymore, and if you switch to it from classic mode it looks like it hasn't been "skinned" (ie it's a mess :-).

If the software can be tweaked a little bit along those lines I think the results will be just great.
TIA,
fp

[NokNok770]

Wow..I did't know this forum got a bare minimum format...I like it....even if it's bare...it works well on the 770. Now did someone said slashdot.com was also like that?....how do you view the bare pages for that.

[fpp]

The mobile URL for Slashdot is /palm
Simple and efficient...