Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Freeware
WordPress Ultimate Gamer's Pack
So you've got a blog and you want gamers to be able to read it easily on their Wii, PSP, or DS? Well, if your blog is built on WordPress, you're in luck! WordPress Ultimate Gamer's Pack is a set of WordPress plugins from David Harper that make your WP blog play nice with game consoles. There's one for the Nintendo Wii, one for the Nintendo DS, and one for the Sony PSP. They aim to eliminate or reduce zooming, scrolling, and changing modes, and they kick in automatically when a gamer logs on--no configuration necessary. The plugins are free, natch, and Harper is even promising an iPhone-optimized plugin within the week!
After spending the better part of an hour on 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mayfield said 3:06PM on 1-15-2007
I thought iPhone already viewed the "real" web... Why do I need to optimize my blog for it? Haaaa... And why the fuck can't the Wii view the "real" web? People play it on large enough screens got-dammit.
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David Harper said 3:22PM on 1-15-2007
@Mayfield
Why Are These Plugins Useful?
Webpages on the Wii are hard to view on default zoom and on many pages (designed wider then 800 pixels) you will have to scroll from side to side. In addition, font sizes that work on a computer screen don’t render well on a TV screen. Large pages designed for the web also gag at times and fail to bookmark. With the DS-Lite the plugin provides a fast loading (DS networking is slow) and readable version while in overview mode. The PSP is delivered a version that eliminates the horizontal scrolling (and reduces the vertical scrolling) required to read your posts and pages.
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Shoaib said 4:19PM on 1-15-2007
I wonder why there isn't one for the PS3 considering that it too has a web browser
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tpp said 2:39PM on 1-16-2007
#3, must have something to do with all those unsold PS3s.
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James said 10:29AM on 1-17-2007
The better question is, why does every web designer feel the need to bloat the shit out of their site? Try visiting the average blog on a PSP and you really get a good perspective on how much crap you never use gets sucked down the pipe every single time you visit -- all the Weblogs-inc sites are prime examples. Let's do a little experiment. Go to DS's front page, or Engadget, or whatever. Select all the content you care about -- probably, this is just the articles in the middle of the blog. Right-click, view selection source (if you're running Firefox). Copy the source, then paste into Notepad or whatever, and save it. Check the size of that file. Now, see how big the entire page is. I'll do it for you -- Engadget, this morning (a typical morning), generated a 127,104 byte page to display articles totalling 47,554 bytes. That means every time you open a page on Engadget, you're wasting about 63% of your text download time on Categories, Recent Comments, links to other blogs in the network, "breaking news", "featured stories"... and that doesn't even count ads or graphics. At the very least, everybody should provide a "lite" version of their site, regardless of what browser you view it on.
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