Saturday, September 06, 2008

Create a free mobile blog with your own domain name using Mofuse

If you are accessing this blog from a mobile phone, then you might want to access the mobile version of my blog – m.shubhspace.com. If you have an existing blog, then you can make it easy to access through a mobile phone using Mofuse.

Mofuse is a free service that will optimize your existing blog to make it suitable for viewing through a mobile phone. Registration is a simple quickie affair. On successful registration you would get an address that looks like example.mofuse.mobi, where example is what you choose as your subdomain while registering. So far so good.

If you have your own domain name, then Mofuse allows you to use it along with your mobile blog. Please note that though you will use your own domain name, while registering, you must enter a suitable *.mofuse.mobi name – it will be used later when you are setting up your domain name with the mobile blog.

Once registered when you go to your control panel, look at the bottom left corner and you will find your mobile blog listed.

Mofuse mobile site

Mofuse custom domain name

Clicking on it will open a page that lets you customize your mobile blog. At the top left corner you will find the, Custom Domain link – click on it.

In the page that opens up, enter the domain name along with the desired sub-domain you want to associate with the mobile blog. I used m as the sub-domain and entered it accordingly.

custom domain name with mofuse

Look below and you will find the instruction to add a CNAME value to your domain records. Note it down and you may now log out.

Mofuse CNAME value

Now go to your DNS Nameserver control panel and add the CNAME value for the domain name. Once it has been added, you may have to wait up to 48 hours for your mobile blog to be accessible.

DNS Nameserver CNAME value for Mofuse

Once accessible you could let people know about it so that if they access your blog from their mobiles they can view a mobile-phone optimized version of your blog. Mofuse recently made all the feature of their paid version accessible in the free version too. Using these features you can also create pages for your mobile blog, independent of your existing blog.  Play around with it to pimp up your mobile blog. If you are an iPhone user, the you may want to visit the iPhone optimized version of my blog – http://m.shubhspace.com/iphone

You can also create and customize your mobile blog with the help of WireNode. What is unique about WireNode is that you can create a full standalone mobile blog with it.

However it does not allow you to use your domain name. Your mobile site will get an address like example.wirenode.mobi. My mobile blog created with Wirenode – shubhspace.wirenode.mobi. Haven’t worked much on it. Just a kludge job.

Hope you found it useful.

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Going through gazillions of blogs and sites, I found that I posses no new insight on the GBrowser. So no re-inventing the wheel. But I did come across this site which has themes for the beautifying Chrome. You may get it here – FreeChromeThemes.

Godspeed