Portable Sleaze

I can't decide whether it's because I'm getting old or simply because my life is otherwise bereft of excitement that last weekend I found myself getting so enthusiastic about making The Sleaze mobile-friendly.  Maybe it was a combination of the two as, in the cold light of day, it is obvious that it was a surprisingly time-consuming and repetitive task involving very little actual creativity or problem solving.  One of the advantages of The Sleaze being Wordpress-based these days is that virtually any kind of modifications or improvements in functionality can be achieved via plugins.  The key is finding the right plugin amongst the plethora offered via the official Wordpress site.  Eventually, I narrowed it down to two possibilities for creating a mobile-friendly version of the site:  WP Touch and Smart WP. 

In truth, the latter had more and better-looking mobile templates in its free version and was simpler to set up, but I ended up using WP Touch instead.  The clincher was that Smart WP simply didn't report usage stats properly - when the site was viewed with a mobile device my tracking services simply showed a generic page title - 'thesleaze' - regardless of which page was being viewed.  This would have rendered my site stats meaningless, as knowing which pages are the most popular and the paths visitors are following when reading the site are key pieces of information.  WP Touch, by contrast, gave full details of the pages looked at by visitors using mobile devices.  So I installed their plugin.  Which is ironic as I'd previously removed it from the site after my last attempt, several years ago, to make it mobile-friendly, due to the fact that, back then, the plugin kept 'breaking' the stats codes, rendering them inoperative and thereby rendering mobile visitors invisible to me. It seems that this problem has been addressed in more recent versions of the plugin as mobile visitors have been fully visible since installing it.

Not actually owning a smartphone myself, I had to do all my testing using online mobile phone emulators - a truly tedious task.  However, the upshot of all this is that if you now view The Sleaze via mobile device (excepting tablets, as the regular template displays OK for such devices) you should see it in a format more suited to such media.  You might well ask why this sudden desire to make the site mobile-friendly?  Well, it all comes down to the Great God Google whom we all must appease or risk being forced off of the web, which has decreed that those sites it decides aren't mobile-friendly will be penalised in search results.  Hence the installation of WP Touch.  Hopefully, this will only be a stop-gap solution until I'm able to find a suitable fully responsive template, which will be able to provide a suitable display for any type of device it is viewed in, for The Sleaze.