Website Previews in Portfolio Pages

One of my todo items for the Ka'anapali Dreamin' website was to feature other websites in the Reviews section. As part of that, I wanted to include a way to include a preview of the site I'm reviewing.

I came across websnapr. It's just a very simple site that lets you enter in a URL and it generates an image in one of various sizes. To test it out, I used it to add previews of my own sites at webnelly.com. You can check it out by viewing one of the site pages here.

Working on Ka'anapali Dreamin' Mobile Site

I started working on a mobile version of my Maui website, Ka'anapali Dreamin', and what I've put together so far can be found at http://kdmaui.mobi

I'm focusing on making much of the regularly updated content available on the mobile site, and paying close attention to keep things simple and elegant, small and speedy. So far, I've added a few things like the current date/time in Hawaii, the Hawaiian word, phrase, and fact of the day (more info), the current weather conditions, news and the daily photos. All of these things already exist on the main site, so it's partly just making it available for web-enabled phones.

The one area I'm struggling with a little bit so far is for blog posts via Blogger. I have no problem parsing the feeds available from the Blogger Data API, it's more the matter of identifying and resizing any images that existing in those posts so they're not as large in terms of download sizes on a web-based phone.

If you have a web-enabled phone and want to check it out, you can go to http://kdmaui.mobi. If you also have any ideas for new content, or maybe have a site of your own or know of a few that might be good to look at, go ahead and post them here.

Thanks.

Creating your own iGoogle Theme

I found this a few weeks back, but just started playing around with it a few days ago. For Google fans like myself, the Google API section was recently updated with an API for creating your own iGoogle Themes so you can customize, create, and share your own themes for iGoogle.

The concept is pretty simple, and one of the things that I always thought was neat was that iGoogle Themes could change their displayed based on the time of day. Although the concept is simple, it's been my experience thus far that putting together and testing out these themes can be a little tedious. However, these could just be minor annoyances that I'm only experiencing because I haven't gotten the full hang of it yet, and I don't want to influence anyone who hasn't tried it for themselves yet.

You can check out the growing collection of iGoogle Themes in their gallery here, if you need a little inspiration. The one I'm working on now is a Maui theme goes along with my Ka'anapali Dreamin' website. It's likely going to take some time, so I don't anticipate it being ready for a few weeks. Once it is, though, I'll be sure to share it here.