Mobile Web For Radio Javan

Just recently, I launched a new version of Radio Javan’s site for the mobile web (finally) which works on the iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre phones (essentially anything running a WebKit-based browser). Even though mobile formatted versions of sites is nothing new, it was a never a high priority for me compared to other development tasks. But over the last few months, the front page of Radio Javan has grown with a lot of content and images that take a while to load which makes it hard to use on 3G networks.

When I started, the first thing that I did was research on some existing iPhone frameworks, such as the popular iUI and the new jQTouch. But they all try to copy the iPhone native style too much and none of them really allowed me to have a custom look and feel. I looked towards some of the sites that I visit frequently on my iPhone such as ESPN, Google Reader, and Facebook, and what did they all have in common — they looked custom made.

So I spent a few weeks figuring out and writing the framework from scratch before I built out the individual pages. What did this involve? Just only less than 300 lines of jQuery code and the necessary CSS. But it really isn’t anything too genius, just took some time figuring out what I wanted. By the way, it is insanely easy and fun when working on supporting only one browser (Webkit), and then to have that browser support all the latest CSS.

The end result? http://m.radiojavan.com

I’ve currently done the most popular sections which includes Music Videos, Events (with geo location), and Podcasts. If you have any feedback, please let me know!