Content Delivery Networks in the Mobile Web era
Everybody likes their Internet fast. Content delivery services (Akamai, Limelight and others) speed up the Web significantly, distributing your media across a global network of caching servers. It’s very likely that the end user is closer to an Akamai mirror than to the origin server, so the experience is improved significantly.
Enter the age of mobile web. At Mobify, we believe that every link on the Web should present an amazing mobile experience. One way to do this is by making content management systems mobile-aware. When the CMS detects a mobile user, it launches an alternate rendering path and generates new HTML server-side. This new mobile web page is then presented to the user – for a great example check out WPTouch, the most popular mobile plugin for WordPress.
The problem is, most content delivery networks don’t bother telling the origin server about mobile users, serving whatever is cached for the URL. And why should they? The whole point of CDN cache is reducing the time it takes to access web content. Plus, when not done properly server-side mobile rendering can actually be worse than the desktop website, as this comic illustrates.
So, what to do? Akamai allows limited code execution right on its edge nodes with EdgeComputing, but this is counterproductive for today’s agile web companies. Mobify’s Studio service relies on JavaScript to detect mobile users, redirecting them to the “m-dot” version of the same URL which is cached separately (see it in action by going to wired.com or newyorker.com on mobile; both use Akamai). In the future we’re going to see even more mobile rendering shifted into the browser, powered by JavaScript and HTML5. This brings the best of both worlds – responsive client-side apps that can be stored on a CDN for optimal performance (we use Amazon Cloudfront).
In my next post, I’ll try to guess why Matt Mullenweg doesn’t use WPTouch on his beautiful personal blog and share some of the things we learned about Drupal 8 from Dries’ DrupalCon keynote. Stay tuned!
Google Instant Previews for Mobile – First Impressions
A few days ago, Google launched Instant Previews on Mobile – a neat new feature for improving search experience for mobile users. Clicking on the preview icon pulls up a set of screenshots representing the content of SERP links, helping users find relevant pages faster.
This is a great example of using client-side technology in order to improve the mobile web experience. Our first impressions are below.
Mobify: now with full Typekit integration
We here at Mobify are excited to announce a partnership with Typekit!
Typekit allows designers to embed custom fonts into their websites and have it render properly across platforms.
Now, Typekit is integrated with Mobify Studio.
This means you can now have beautiful custom fonts on your mobile website as well as your desktop site! Wired.com is already using it to further unify their desktop and mobile websites. Check it out their mobile site by going to m.wired.com.
Click through for instructions on how to add Typekit to your Mobify site
Tablets, Mobile E-Commerce and Mobify
If you haven’t noticed, tablets are becoming a bit of a big deal.
The supposed panacea to all the problems of print media has a new king: the iPad 2. While initially hailed as the saviour of print, the iPad has fast risen to the top of mobile devices used for browsing the web.
In fact, every single one of our e-commerce sites has the iPad as one of the top 10 devices used to access their respective stores.
However, tablets are not phones. Their screens are considerably larger, eliminating much of the need to dramatically change the UI, as is needed on phones. Some store’s desktop websites look just as good on a tablet as they do on a monitor. This does not mean that tablets should be treated as desktop computers. Even if you can see elements well, you still need to make buttons large enough to be pressed with sometimes imprecise fingers.
GQ Launches Mobile Site
Leading men’s magazine GQ has recently launched their mobile site using Mobify Studio.
Seeing a spike in mobile traffic, GQ wanted to improve the mobile experience for their users.
Now readers can get updates on fashion, style and culture, no matter where they are, with a mobile friendly interface.
Check it out by going to www.gq.com on your smartphone.
