I’ve just rebuilt my onepolitics website, which aims to bring together the latest from a personal selection of prominent political blogs into a single page. It’s the third incarnation of the site in less than a year: initially it was built in WordPress, then rebuilt in June as a more straightforward PHP/RSS-powered website. It’s had a steady trickle of people using it, measured in the dozens each day, but I’ve never pitched it as a public service: it’s always been for me primarily, but anyone else is welcome to drop by.
Version three recognises the primary use case of the key target audience (me): mostly on my mobile. And having just got my hands on a new T-Mobile G1 Googlephone, it seemed sensible to make the design work best in that context. So I’ve recoded the pages to give b-i-g touchscreen-friendly clickable areas, and applied some conditional code to select appropriate styling for the G1 and (as best I can) the iPhone. If you’re on something else, including a desktop browser, you’ll still get more or less the v2 design.
I’ve abandoned the filtering options, as it didn’t seem people were using them anyway. So now the site concentrates solely on its ‘homepage’ presentation of the latest 20 items from the political blogs considered by our editorial board (me again) to be the most prominent and influential. Updating is lightning fast, usually within a few minutes of an article’s publication, as it’s powered by feeds from Google Reader.
If anyone’s got an iPhone, could you try it out for me, and let me know how well it matches? I’ve tried to follow the Apple guidance, as far as I could be bothered anyway; and testiphone.com has been helpful (when used in conjunction with Firefox’s User Agent Switcher plugin).
PS: Quick Android tip. I’ve only seen it advertised on 18-month contracts, with no charge for the handset; but I got mine in a T-Mobile store on a 12-month contract for a £49.99 payment. I don’t know about you, but 18 months is a l-o-n-g time to be locked in.
Responses
I am one of your users and Labour Matters has linked to it for months. As such could I just say that I liked the blogs and print tabs. I also liked the video as it was very unbiased and rapidly updated (unlike Politics Home).
It looks nicer, but I still feel robbed!
Er… ok, it may make an unscheduled comeback. Never let it be said I’m not responsive. 🙂
Looks very nice on my iPhone. As a first-time visitor the response to tapping the body text surprised me – I expected it to expand downwards to show the full text, or at least to take me to the full article, but nothing at all happened when I tapped it. Not immediately obvious that the headline was the link to touch – but given that it took me less than a second to think of tapping that too I don’t really think it’s a problem…Just thought you might like to know.
By public demand… I’ve restored the filtering function to onepolitics. If you press the button for ‘want to filter?’, the various filtering options will slide into view. They’re hidden using javascript, primarily to aid viewing on the smaller screen devices.