Do you use a smartphone to browse aBlogtoWatch.com? If you do, you are now enjoying a much better view of the site, thanks to our new smartphone screens we rolled out recently, and we would like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Half of our visits come from smartphones and tablets, and while most tablets will continue to enjoy the full desktop experience of the site, we have needed for some time to address the needs of smaller screens (and bandwidths) without compromising functionality, ease-of-navigation, or the amount of information we display on a page.

Easier To Read

That’s the goal of a site with articles – it needs to be easy to read. For smartphones, we cranked up the font size and tossed out the sidebar so the text columns fit the screen.

Solid Smartphone Navigation

Look on the upper-left of the view on your smartphone, and you’ll see a new navigation menu button. It’s called a “hamburger menu,” those three parallel, horizontal thick lines you see at the top of most mobile screens out there. It is compact, easily accessible, and slides out with the same menu choices of our full desktop site menu.

Full Functionality On Your Smartphone

Everything you can do on the full desktop site, you can do on your smartphone device on aBlogtoWatch.com. Using our filter system to find articles on category pages and the All Articles page is easier than before, and the Watch Brands page makes it easy to find watch brands by first letter.

All the Watch Porn You Can Eat, For Two-Thirds Of The Calories (Well, Web Site Size, At Least)

We got rid of some code and some image loading that the smartphone views do not need, so the pages should load a little faster even with all of these large images we love. We want everyone to experience the same images and good performance, no matter the device they are on.

I Got 99 Viewports But A Watch Ain’t One…

Google Analytics tells us there are actually 2,723 different viewports (browser windows on different devices) that visited our site in the last 30 days. We could test only a few physical phones as we developed the smartphone views of the site. It is possible that your experience could vary, so let us know if you experience a view on your smartphone that doesn’t look quite right.

Device emulators often deliver spotty results, due to the fact that most just aren’t very good, and for our purposes, some of this coding is done by targeting the width of the viewport (responsive code), some is done targeting device and orientation (adaptive code), and there is also a mix of the type of code that does these things – CSS, PHP and JavaScript. So, the whole thing’s basically a crap-shoot as to whether or not it looks/works great on every phone in the universe. This is where you come in…

Known Issues

Windows Phones “Pinch In”: After getting some feedback from the aBlogtoWatch team before releasing the mobile views, I’ve learned that on Windows phones, you may need to “pinch-in” the screen once it loads, so it will operate at just the full width of the screen. This is a known issue with Windows (of course) mobile browsers that do not recognize the literal “viewport” tag in the code that tells all the other mobile browsers in the world to read it as a mobile site. I have added a script that should fix this, so it may not be an issue for you.

Disqus Comments Are Small: Our new commenting system Disqus, is not responsive. They do not allow any control over font size. I hate that right alongside you, but I can’t do anything about it. They are aware of the complaint, but promise no changes as of yet. I’ve left the ability for the user to pinch in and out, so that may help, or alternatively, reading the comments in landscape mode works.

Talk To Us

So, please let us know below if you encounter bugs or annoyances – please note your exact make/model of device and screenshots are always helpful. Or, feel free to comment if you want to complain about the fact that we are still waiting for Livefyre to give us 4 days of missing comments from last week, or anything else technical. Praise, or complain about, Disqus (because they do read the comments). Heck, go ahead and comment if you just want to complain about whatever you feel we can help you with.

Or, just leave me a biscuit/cracker/cough drop in the form of the best image you have found on the Internet in the last week – keep it clean(ish), please 🙂 – in honor of the aBlogtoWatch team members who exist behind the scenes and do not get the chance to write many articles. Go forth, and enjoy aBlogtoWatch on your smartphone!