It’s time to get ready for an overhaul of mobienthusiast.mobi, and that means there will be a bit of confusion while categories are deleted and files are redirected. Please stand by, and use the “search” feature to find the article you would like to read. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may cause in the short term. Get ready for some great new features and a site redesign for 2009. Thanks for your continued readership!

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Summer is officially here in the Northern Hemisphere, and my friends in the blogosphere are telling me that things are going to quiet down a bit. Perhaps my blogger friends didn’t get the memo that mobile searches and traffic go up in the summer since most people want to be outside and away from their computers. This mobi blog tends to actually heat up in the summer since many web surfers take their mobile phones online. Face it people, we are addicted!

These fun-loving bloggers have launched an international internet game of “tag” and I am now “it.” This game offers a small snippet of the human element of the bloggers behind the blogs. Thank you to Jay Ehret, President of The Marketing Spot (computer link) (mobile link – warning, large graphic sizes), for inviting me to play.

SUMMER MEME

4 things you like about summer
- The smell of coconut sunscreen
- The Pacific Ocean warms up just enough to leave the wetsuit home
- Relaxed summer schedules
- Mobile search results increase (it’s true!)

4 of your favorite vacation destinations
- Miami, Florida
- Chicago, Illinois
- Marco Island, Florida
- Austin, Texas

4 of your favorite summer foods
- Barbecued Wild Salmon
- Grilled Vegetables
- Avocados
- Thai food (that’s all year long)

4 concerts not to miss
- Any concert at the beach
- Jimmy Buffet
- Local bands at coffee houses
- Andrew Sherman Vehicle (computer link)(if you can’t promote your friends what’s the point?)

4 Summer activities you must do
- Visit my parents
- Participate in the Library’s summer reading program
- Barbecue
- Go surfing with 20 or more other women at Surf Diva weekend surf clinics in La Jolla

4 things to avoid during the summer
- Dangerous aquatic animals such as sting rays, jellyfish, sea urchins and great white sharks
- Rip currents (this looks like two waves smashing into each other from opposite directions and can carry you out to sea even from ankle-depth)
- Strong afternoon sun
- Starch in my clothes

Tag – You’re it! Here is an invitation for a few fellow bloggers (Computer Links Only)
Jamie Parks
Javier Marti
Shaun Morton
Jeremy Padawar
Sherman Hu

Photo Credit: Massimiliano Pieraccini from Italy via 123rf.com (computer link)

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Thank you for your patience during our mobile outage last night (or yesterday for those of you on different timezones). I am in the process of testing some advertising, and the wordpress mobile plugin didn’t like it much and suggested I was messing up the header.

For those of you who are planning to modify the wordpress mobile plugin from Andy Moore, here is what I added to fix header errors:

After the opening <?php add this line of code:

ob_start();

So, this is what the start of the plugin will look like:

<?php
ob_start();

Now I am off to find out why the banners look so odd and to fix them. Thank you to iLyrics.mobi and modernist.mobi for your patience. This is why it is called beta testing.

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Looking at the statistics for this month, it’s time to acknowledge and thank people from literally all over the world for reading mobi Enthusiast. It just goes to show that .mobi really is as global as .com if not moreso. Thank you for reading and linking to this mobi blog.

Here are the countries that show in mobi Enthusiast’s June’s AWstats, listed in descending order of pageviews:

United States
Germany
Unknown (mostly BlackBerry browsers)
Hong Kong
UK
Canada
Australia
France
South Africa
Finland
Czech Republic
Italy
Netherlands
India
Vietnam
Japan
Israel
China
Brazil
Paraguay
Spain
Russian Federation
Portugal
Malaysia
Ireland
Greece
Singapore
Argentina
Namibia
Phillipines
South Korea
Belgium
Switzerland
Sweden
Slovenia
Estonia
Turkey
Norway
Romania
Indonesia
Chile
Taiwan
Pakistan
New Zealand
Ukraine
Bangladesh
Mexico
Denmark
Saudi Arabia
Lebanon
Thailand
Iceland
Laos
Bahrain
Mauritius
Cameroon
Sri Lanka
Slovak Republic

This is concrete proof that .mobi is of international interest. What’s your .mobi?

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If you have a g-rated .mobi site that scores at least a 3/5 on the ready.mobi test, let us know about it and you may find your site on mobiEnthusiast.mobi.Please send us a short description of your site and your link to information [at] mobiEnthusiast.mobi. Please note that there is no charge for submission, and there are no guarantees to include any site.

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We are using a new theme for mobiEnthusiast.mobi since a large portion of the site was not visible on mobile devices, which sort of defeated the purpose of having a mobile site in the first place. Unfortunately, that means that our directory will need to be relocated. Not to worry, we already have a domain name reserved and will be launching a sister site in about a month or so.

Thanks for sticking with us for the transition, and we look forward to having you as a reader now and in the future. Here’s to the .mobi enthusiasts!

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Did you notice the last part of our domain name ends in .mobi and not .com? That’s because this site and others like it are specially designed to be viewed on a mobile phone, iPhone, BlackBerry, or other PDA.

You may have heard of the mobile internet. This is it. Of course, this isn’t the only way to get mobile content, but most sites ending in .com, .net, .ca, .co.uk, .de, .fr and others are great for a computer, but they usually don’t work on a mobile device.

Let mobiEnthusiast be your tour guide for the new wireless web. It’s going to be a great ride.

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