Yabfog

Mailto links give error dialog in browser when email address is missing .

FYI: My BlackBerry's Web browser identifies itself (i.e., "User Agent") as: BlackBerry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

So in PHP, an inexpensive check would be something like:

if ( 0 === stripos($useragent, 'blackberry') ) {
    echo "True";
}

After about two weeks of unresponsiveness, I finally found yet another way to contact the Washington Post to complain about their broken website (see my previous post for more info). This time, they promptly responded to my complaint, and within three or four days, the website was fixed.

My contact person, Sarah Lumbard, was courteous and helpful. Thank you, Sarah.

At some point today, the Washington Post broke its website for Blackberry users (and perhaps other mobile device users).

Now, any time I try to access an article by clicking on a link in my RSS aggregator on my Blackberry, I get redirected to some lame "mobile site," and I can't see the story I'm trying to read.

Shame on you, Washington Post!

UPDATE: Emails went unanswered, so I called them at 703.469.2500. Me: "Your website is broken to Blackberry users." WaPo (with a level of disinterest I thought only possible when talking to an accountant at a cocktail party): "It is?" We'll see what happens...

Truly re-inspired by Dave's injection of interest into mobile news reading, I've been tinkering with my own custom solution. Since I subscribe to NewsGator, I'm using the NewsGator API for some backend, but I've done quite a bit of plumbing myself.

The most important things I wanted to be able to do were (1) to be able to mark posts read (and since I'm using NewsGator, that "read" status synchronizes across all my aggregator clients on different computers) and (2) to fix the annoying nonsense characters introduced by idiotic feed generators -- that includes the New York Times and Washington Post.

The results are starting to shape up nicely.

Here's the main page I see after I sign in.

And notice that in FeedDemon, "Chávez" is screwy, but I've got it right.

I'm testing Dave Winer's new web application: Yomoblog. It is a dead simple tool for creating, editing and categorizing blog posts from your web-enabled PDA.