Google’s Blogger is, by far, the most popular platform for blogs. But the service, despite its continuing growth, has been confined to the desktop environment – at least if you want to work with a template and set of tools that are designed for mobile use. Blogger has changing that picture, however, with the release of smart mobile apps and the more recent mobile templates feature.
Mobile templates are smartphone-optimized versions of all 27 “template designer” templates from Blogger. Beyond retaining the basic look and feel of your blog when being accessed from a web-enabled smartphone, mobile templates add a Mobile Preview button to your desktop interface (along with a QR-code to quickly view the page on your smartphone), automatic redirection for smartphones, increased accessibility for videos embedded in your posts, easier commenting, and mobile advertisements for anyone who already had AdSense or in-line ads.
You can enable this feature by going to your Blogger dashboard and choosing Settings > Email & Mobile and then enabling the “Mobile Template” option. Note that if you’re not using one of the 27 Blogger templates, your blog will be displayed with a default mobile template instead.
While you can simply see this change as expanding into a growing platform, there are additional incentives. Blogger as a service traditionally competes, at a broad level, with social network services like Twitter; users often choose whether to compose a full entry in their blog or a “micro-blog” in 140 characters or less. As social sites have becoming more mobile, Blogger naturally sees a churn of potential users who prefer the option they can use – as both an author and viewer – on the run.
[via The Blogger Buzz blog]
