The one exception is the community or local news paper. In George we used to buy the George Herald every Thursday without fail. Why? It is relevant news to me. Here in Brackenfell we get the Tyger Burger once a week and I try to skim past all the ads to see what’s important.

Now have a look at the two newspapers’ websites:

The George Herald

Not bad at all. It is quite a good looking site. It has some very interesting elements which I like and a lot they can add that would make it even better, but I’ll talk about that at a later stage. One HUGE flaw is there is no mobile offering. None whatsoever, which is a major oversight in my opinion. Turns out that they do have a mobile offering at http://m.georgeherald.com. Thanks for letting me know Angelique. At least, if you want to get the latest local news online in George, you can.

Tyger Burger (I’m not even going to link to this for obvious reasons…)

I’m speechless…

I have a couple of theories why:

1. Media24 don’t spend much time or effort on this. Community newspapers are not exactly hugely scalable businesses. That I get. The thing is, a web and mobile offering shouldn’t cost much. Even is they slap on WordPress it would be a 100% improvement. While it may not be a hugely scalable business, it could be a sustainable one creating job opportunities. Let’s call it a community service then. This is just shocking!

2. They’re simply lame. This I doubt as I know these guys and they’re not.

3. They’ve have no competition and because it is news you won’t find elsewhere you have to take what they give. In other words they simply don’t care. Sure, this is a viable reason, but the same could be said of the George Herald and they’ve done it differently. Refer to point number 2.

4. As a business unit they do not have the budget to do a good web and mobile offering. I’m sorry, but then they are doing it wrong. If the George Herald can do it, the Tyger Burger should be able to do so much more. Hell, talk to us if you feel strong enough about it.

I’d love to know:

Are you interested in local news? Do you often read it and how? If it had a great online and mobile offering, would you read it?

I must admit, being a Georgian myself, I do feel somewhat proud.

It looks like a seriously slick phone. It has all the right bells and whistles that one wants like social media integration (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc…) and it has a cool looking web browser that is based on Webkit (same as Safari and Google Chrome). Add the fact that it is powered by a 800MHz processor, has a 5 Megapixel camera and have all the funky touch screen goodness of the other big players, you start to realise this could maybe be a pretty cool phone!

The only thing that may put me off is that it is probably powered by Windows. Which means that it is going to be a bitch to develop apps for if you’re a Mac user :)

I’d love to try it. Seriously, go check the movie and the site out and you would see what I mean. It is pretty slick!

I’ve learned a little bit about developing for mobile devices. (feedback on m.afrigator.com would be welcomed!) Something I’m completely new at. The great thing about this is there are so much to learn, but it seems very hard to find quick, straight answers to your problems. It is challenging which is a great thing. By the way, Mobiforge is a great resource!

I’ve decided that I’ll set out and try and learn and share something new every day for the rest of the year. It may be something arbitrary, something tech related, some new word, it really doesn’t matter, as long as I learn something new every single day. I might not always share it, but I’ll try!

Lets start with yesterday, since I did learn something fascinating. Wezzo tweeted yesterday about a stunning new supercar that is being built right here on home soil in South Africa. Read more about the Perana Z-One here. It is a stunning piece of machinery. One 999 units are going to be manufactured and they will only retail (allegedly) for about $75 000 or R750 000. A bit much for my budget, still, pretty car that!

Designers, boy, have I got news for you! If you think you had issues with browser compatibility, brace yourselves. You ain’t seen nothing yet! You should KNOW your XHTML mobile markup and you should be able to improvise and think out of the box. You are going to work with incredible constraints. Screen sizes aren’t 640 x 480, they’re even smaller. Usability is completely different. Its a whole new ball game. Javascript and AJAX is almost a no-no if you want your designs to work on a wider spectrum of phones.

Secondly, you’ll have to rethink almost everything. Mobile users are a different animal to web users. On the web things are simply easier. It is easier to type. It is easier to navigate. It is easier to browse. Web users browse a lot. Mobile users don’t necessarily. They are more often than not looking for information. Whether we’re talking about a Facebook social network type of application or an online business directory, they’re looking for information. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Web users don’t look for information or Mobile users never browse. That is simply not true, but the predominant focus shifts.

What I find interesting is that I don’t often see bloggers blogging about their mobile traffic. I’ve seen them talking about their web traffic lots of time, alas, not really much about mobile. In fact, I’ve never seen that, but then again: n00b! Will this change? Bloggers do their blogging mostly on computers, not via their mobile phones. They more often than not have access to a connected computer. Why would they need to access the internet via their phones? I’m NOT going to sit at my computer connected to the internet and grab my mobile phone to check another site! That makes no sense. (Well, this ain’t true, but it is because I’m developing a mobile site :P ) More on bloggers and mobile in another post. Soon.

Lastly, Tyler Reed is much more clever than people think… No pressure Tyler! We’re looking forward to see what you cook up for us.

There are tons I’m learning and I will from time to time add interesting stuff I found here. Heaven forbid…

Lastly, I’m almost pissed off that Afrigator did not have a stronger mobile focus from word go. In hindsight, another one of my incredibly stupid things I’ve done. Oh well, there are always time for change, right? Right! Expect it. It is coming…

I read the following which does not help much: S60 Platform: Web Browser Product Description. It is a brilliant document if ever you need it, it simply didn’t answer this specific question for me.

I don’t really have much more time to spend researching the problem, so I thought I’ll try to crowdsource the answer… Hopefully someone has an answer, otherwise I’ll have to digg deeper :( Trying my luck and being lazy! ;-)

UPDATE:
The content of the cookie is 1

You would probably run into this if your domain name is something like http://afrigator.mobi, without the www. or m. (i.e. without a domain prefix). The issue is that cookies for a specific domain are specified like:

//Cookie domain
$domain = '.afrigator.mobi';

A phone like the Nokia 6110 Navigator (its the phone I use, but there may well be lots more) is looking for the domain prefix (the www. or m.) and fails to store the cookie if none is present like in the case of http://afrigator.mobi

A pain in the butt which you might want to be aware of! The solution? Add a prefix should work. Downloading and installing Opera Mini could also work (although, I’m speculating since I have not tried that, but will soon enough). Anyone know of any other solution?