CogDogMoBlog (WinkSite)

Sometimes technology is just playing around. I am guilty of that for the last 45 minutes. But with a curious interest in the now fringe-world of “moblogging” (mobile blogs, or accessing blogs via mobile phones), I stumbled across WinkSite, which allows anyone to create a web site / blog that is accessible via a phone-like device, as well as an emulator via a web browser.

“Why would anyone do this?” The age old reply to that famous dog question is, “because they can”.

Before the details, though here is the credit string. I started reading about the interesting social phenomena of camera phones “Oh My! News by Million Camera Phones” posted by Brian, which he nicely credits to the source at Smart Mobs, and skimming around there, realized that I needed Howard Rheingold in my aggregator (ker-plunk), and right below the syndication links at Smart Mobs is this curious link to WinkSite, and there went the next 3/4 hour, setting up a new WinkSite for CDB (note this URL does not seem to get you there in Safari browser, you may have to manually enter the wiinksite id 3719).

I added an image link to winksite via what is now getting a link heavy right side nav bar to the CDB dog house…

However, I found the cut and paste code from WnkSite to be, well feeble. But the link they provided simply plopped me to the home page of winksite, rather than opening the nice litttle emulator window I could from their site. So I rolled up my HTML sleeves and went to work.

First, you need a pop-up JavaScript function to work in your HEAD, slurped from the winksite source:

function spawnWindow(wurl, wname, width, height) {
		thewindow = window.open(wurl,wname,'width='+width+',height='+height+
',toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,resizeable=no,scrollbars=no');
		thewindow.focus();
	}

And then re-writing their Cut and Paste from a cheesy pop-up in a new window:

<a href="http://winksite.com/index.cfm?emulator_popup=3719" target="_blank"><img alt="WINKsite" border="0" height="31" src="http://winksite.com/images/wink_link.gif" vspace="5" width="88"></a><br>

to

<a href="http://winksite.com/html/emulator_frameset.cfm?susid=3719"onClick="spawnWindow(this.href,'winker',211,432); return false"><img alt="WINKsite" border="0" height="31" src="http://winksite.com/images/wink_link.gif" vspace="5" width="88"></a>

Well, there it is- a little pop up that goes to a mobile phone emulator. There are many more things winksite allows you to add, but more time is needed. My “SmartMob” IQ is pretty low right now, but there is the potential, and perhaps one day, a few years from now, mobile phone services in the USA will reach what they were in Korea in say, 2002.

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