Feral Jundi

Recently I have been doing some research on the statistics of the blog and stumbled upon a startling figure. Feral Jundi has had a massive increase in traffic from mobile devices like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or from tablets like iPad. Here is a screen shot of what I am talking about. The key figure here is that the blog went from 1,222 visits from mobile devices in 2010 from Jan to July, to 10,246 visits during the same time period this year. That is a 739 % increase!

The top 5 devices used, and in this order were iPhone, Android, iPad, iPod, and BlackBerry. So with this data, I decided I needed to upgrade and improve upon the mobile version of Feral Jundi.  After doing some research and shopping around, I finally settled upon a company called Brave New Code that makes some software that converts blogs into mobile websites. The set up is called WP Touch Pro, and I am very happy with the final product. I paid $39 for it, and it was a good investment in my view. (disclaimer–I am now an affiliate for WP Touch Pro because I like it so much!)

I went with the Pro version, as opposed to the free version, just because it had some features that I really liked. Plus you get access to their support. The only tweaking I had to do to make it work with my blog is to modify my Quick Cache plugin. In their forum, they talk about exactly how to do this, and it was easy to do. Here is a screen shot of the home page as it would look on iPhone.

So I figured I would highlight some of the features of this thing. If you want to read a post you can click on the title and the whole thing will pop up. Or you can see just a teaser of the post by clicking that arrow button just to the right of the title. But once you get to the actual post, here is a screen shot of that.

In order to read the post, you will have to touch that right side scroll bar and move it down to check out the post. The Chitika ads are both from the website and the mobile ads. the little Chitika ad in the footer will continue to slide down as you read, or you can remove the ad by pressing that X on the ad.  Or if you want to check out that ad, just tap it and you will be able to check it out. At this time, the blog’s Ad Center is not available for mobile. I might play around with this and see what I can come up with in the future. Just check into the Advertising Page up top to find out any news about that kind of thing, or just contact me.

Now the other feature is the Menu, which is a button located in the header at the right side. To check out the Menu, just tap it with your finger and you will get this page.

Pretty self explanatory  here, and I will let the reader explore what they want from here. The book, blocks, and tags graphics are the ‘menu’, categories, and popular tags of the website. So if you want to go back and explore old posts in the archives, that is how you can do it. You can also use the search feature which is a graphic that looks like a magnifying glass.

Some other cool stuff is the comments are indicated by the red dots with numbers in them, indicating how many comments for each post. You can still make comments by following along with the post and scrolling down to the bottom. You also have several means of sharing the post, either by using the ‘share’ button between the post and the comments, or you can click the Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook buttons at the top of the post.

Finally, and this is a cool little deal that I have been playing around with lately. I have come up with a Seal of Feral Jundi. This is something I can use for publications, icons, favicons, etc. Also, this is the homepage icon for FJ, and this new mobile platform will prompt folks to put it on their phone. This makes it very easy to go right to FJ when you want to read it. (if anyone has the old icon, just delete it and re-do the whole process to get the new icon on your mobile device or tablet. Here is a picture of the icon.

The meaning behind this seal is pretty basic, but unique. The Laurel symbolizes education and victory. The serpent swallowing the person is called the Biscione. It has different meanings to different users of the symbol, but for me, I like the Visconti family history of the symbol. It represents to them a serpent that attacked a village, and the Visconti family destroyed that serpent, and was famous for doing so. So for my purposes, the serpent represents evil or the enemy attacking the innocent, and this blog’s dedication to fighting that. And finally, the crown symbolizes leadership.

I might play around more with the concept, but so far I like it. So enjoy and I appreciate any feedback. The folks on Facebook have visited the site on different mobile platforms, and so far they said it is working. –Matt