S2Central on your mobile phone ?

[S2central.net]

I have been thinking about making some of the content at S2central more suitable for browsers on a mobile phone... Probably the buyers guide and some basic fault-finding / diagnostic stuff.

I'm aware the site is due a big update in general, and I am hopeful of finding some time for this over the rest of the year.

It just seemed appropriate to create a mobile friendly part of the site in this day and age. I have a Nokia N73 which does a mighty job of web browsing all things considered but if the pages were optimised for that screen size - staying low on graphics to keep bandwidth usage down - then it would be nice.

Initial ideas are the Buyers Guide that could be accessed when viewing a car to remind of what to look for. Possibly the VIN decoder (assuming Javascript interop is OK). But I think the most useful part of the site would be diagnostic / fault-finding guide to help anyone stuck on the side of the road with a problem... Who you gonna call ? Thats where this forum can help cos collectively we can offer up solutions to just about any problem the S2 owner is going to face.

What think ye ?

[Nuvo]

Sounds like a good idea to me. I remember a few years back Phil Payne the ur quattro guru was looking into doing this, posting things like torque setting, service item part numbers and so on.

Fault codes code be very helpful indeed, particularly whe "out in the field".

I'm not sure if it ever took off though as I saw some recent posts by him asking about different technical issues.

Maybe this link would be of some help to you:
linky

[S2central.net]

A useful link - thanks - I must get my head round all this CSS nonsense - I am a mere amateur at this stuff. Use of Frames, tickers and Javascript is about as far as I got

The assembled webheads like yourself, Sonic and others are better at this - maybe I should focus on the content and let the forum netheads create the correct styling and format to navigate with a phone.

[Ski]

Yes this is a excellent idea!!

Im clueless when it comes to website design, but BBC website is excellent as it automatically detects if your using a mobile and presents you with a mobile friendly page.

Good luck with this project, a step in the right direction if you can pull it off.

[S2central.net]

Aye - well if the BBC can't do it properly (spending all that TV license money of ours) with some of the best media/web designers about then nobody can !

[S2central.net]

Could also add support for RSS on S2central actually - a useful to announce new content (when it arrives)... Would also be worth thinking about RSS feeds from S2forum.com also - to announce gatherings/events, group purchases, site maintenance - just thinking out loud. Need to do some homework on this, but more importantly capture the essence of what users would actually like to do with such technology.

[Sonic]

The easiest way to do this would be to simply set a CSS Stylesheet that mobile devices such as phones would use by default (as apposed to the one that your web browser you looking at this in now uses).

This stylesheet would ideally display the page content with the majority of images and media stripped out, with slight modifications to the layout, optimised for the smaller devices.

On more modern sites, or more accessible websites this is really easy, you would simply create a new stylesheet and add to the the head tag of the page, linking it to mobile devices - on more "outdated" websites though - this could be quite a chore!

As for RSS, the most common use it loading data from a database and sending it to a client when the information is requested. This involves storing the necessary information and turning it into XML (an RSS feed) when its requested, using something like PHP or another server side language

(And yes it is 3:06am, and i am doing mind numbing stuff like

$arrProducts = array_merge ($arrProducts, $this->objSoap->call ('get_products', $arrProductParams));

// Update the request variables

$intMin += $intRequestNum;
$intTotalProducts = $arrProducts[0]['Total_Products'];

}
while ($intTotalProducts > ($intMin + $intRequestNum));

// Truncate the products table

$this->objDb->Query ("
TRUNCATE
TABLE " . MYSQL_TBL_CT_PRODUCTS . "
");

// If there were any errors

if ($this->objDb->IsError ())
{

// Set Error

$this->objError->Error ($this->objDb->GetError ())

[Markarina]

just tried s2central.net on my Nokia E61 using both the nokia browser and opera and it all seem to work fine, admittedly I didn't have a vin code to hand to try but the actual tool loaded up ok

[Sonic]

Modern phones tend to use *real* browsers like opera which will render more complicated html and css. As you said, you may even be lucky enough to run client side scripts like javascript!

The interesting part comes when you try to display a 760px wide page on a phone thats 200px wide - how did it look?

[Markarina]

viewing in the nokia native browser you had to scroll around to see everything, in opera it was absolutely fine