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News and Comment July 2013

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1 July (Part 1) - Bonkers on the move

Type 700My first encounter with a mobile telephone was in 1963. While undergoing training with GPO telephones some young fools which included me, screwed a telescopic aerial to a type 700 telephone, at the time the latest and greatest from an organisation that had just left Bakelite behind, and took it on a train journey pretending to be making calls. We thought it was very funny while fellow passengers went looking for another compartment.

50 years later nearly half the visitors to this website are using mobile devices, most of them being i-something or other. Not possessing such a device myself I only know what users tell me about how Bonkers looks scaled down to quarter size. Most say it is perfectly OK while just a few indicate it could be better, hence the recent site tinkering.

Most obviously a ’mobile icon’ has appeared alongside the menu on most pages. Clicking it (†) will temporarily flick the page size to the same as an i-phone when held horizontally. A similar A button appears to switch it back. The blog pages have additional choices. Play with them and it should be fairly obvious what happens. If you particularly like one setting you can fix it permanently in the Configure menu.

While researching all this I came across some code which allows a mobile device to grab all the info it needs about a website to configure itself in the best way it knows how. That code has been added but one tester has told me it tends to override the other choices. It can be removed if it becomes a nuisance.

Because the site was not designed for mobiles, some of the older pages only partially comply with the new arrangements. Everything from the beginning of June 2013 onwards should be OK but other pages will have to be modified as I stumble across the offenders.

There are some pages that will prove near impossible to modify but If anyone sees a problem please let me know, without a mobile phone of my own I’m unlikely to find everything myself.

† For those with big thumbs, clicking anywhere on the blank portion of the menu background will have the same effect as clicking the Mobile icon.

Note: The website was made fully scalable for smaller screens in May 2018 and since then most of it has been retrospectively made compatible. The Mobile icon is long gone.

 

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