Well…I’ve been travelling around the interweb, reading – or simply adding to Instapaper for later and trying to get round to reading – lots of lovely articles, blog posts and suchlike on the current happenings around the Mobile Web. As you’ll well know (seeing as you’re reading this) the Mobile Web is a hot topic at the moment, so I thought I’d highlight some of the things I’m reading up on right now.

The Opera Mobile Web Optimisation Guide

The guys at Opera are superb when it comes to talking and teaching about web development techniques and the current state of the web. I’ve enjoyed listening and talking to both Patrick Lauke and Bruce Lawson in the last few months and Bruce has taken his talk around this and built it into a handy guide, available on the Opera Developers website. Bruce talks about the options available when looking to deliver your content to mobile devices and gives loads of really useful advice and tips on stuff to do, stuff to avoid and delivers a really nice outline on why CSS Media Queries are so powerful and can help you build mobile-aware, adaptive websites that don’t have to check which browser the content is being delivered to but checks the device settings themselves (think “display resolution”). I strongly encourage you to check this guide out if you haven’t before.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-mobile-web-optimization-guide/

Combining meta viewport and media queries

Following on with the CSS Media Queries angle, this article on quirksmode gives you a full walkthrough of how to combine <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width”> with media queries to enable your website to resize to fit any display. It tells you what these do, why you should use them and gives the whole technique, with helpful screenshots. Excellent.

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/09/combining_meta.html

Rethinking the Mobile Web

This is a truly great set of slides that Bryan Rieger of Yiibu recently delivered at the Over The Air event at Imperial College, London. Here Bryan gives us an outline of device usage, mobile browsers and – echoing Patrick’s & Bruce’s message – the options available to us when it comes to making mobile friendly websites (and apps – we can’t ignore those). Bryan puts a damn good point across that maybe we should design our sites for mobile devices FIRST, then add in the capability for the site to adapt for desktop. It’s a different way of approaching the whole creation and I’m really into that way of thinking.

http://www.slideshare.net/bryanrieger/rethinking-the-mobile-web-by-yiibu

The Mobile Web is NOT The Next Big Thing

Haha…now to end with something more leftfield This article, written by web designer John O’Nolan takes a playful swipe at those people that trot out the whole “Next Big Thing” line. John gives us an entertaining look at the evolution of the web on mobile and does put a nice perspective on things. What’s even better is that some of the thoughtful comments round out the whole thing to make a nicely smart piece on viewing the state of the mobile web.

http://john.onolan.org/the-mobile-web-is-not-the-next-big-thing/

So, a few things there for you to have a look at and digest. We’ll be seeing this talked about more and more I suspect. Cheers! M