Enable Blogger Mobile Templates Support for WP7 and Opera Mobile

Blogger recently released a new feature to their Blogger in draft platform that allows the website to automatically detect mobile browsers and render the page using a small-screen friendly template. This fixes a HUGE issue I have been working on for the last few weeks ever since I released the PhraseMeme Scanner application, namely publishing content that will be consumed by both large and small screen devices. Previously I was planning on having two version of the website with one being optimized for mobile and one for desktop, but now I can store all the content on Blogger and use the mobile templates to render for small-screen devices.

The Show mobile template currently works with the default iPhone and Android browsers, but it does not work with the Opera Mobile, Pocket IE, or Windows Phone 7 Internet Explorer browsers. I assume there are other mobile browsers that also don’t work, but there is a simple way to add support for any browser by using JavaScript to redirect users.  Here is the code that I wrote to detect mobile browsers and redirect accordingly:

The templates work by appending a m=1 parameter to the blog URL or (m=0 to force full webpage on mobile devices), so all that the above code has to do is look for that parameter and add it if a mobile device is detected. You can add the above script to your blog using either the blog template or the HTML/Javascript Gadget. Adding it to the blog template will cause it to run before the page is fully loaded, but you should save your current template first to make sure you don’t mess anything up;

I added a feature request for Blogger to support more mobile browsers, but for now the above script should let you start using this amazing feature.

Windows Phone Barcode Library (Silverlight C# ZXing Port)

I have been working on a Barcode Scanning application for Windows Phone 7 for about 3 months now, but none of my efforts would have been possible without the prior work done by Google on the open source ZXing (“Zebra Crossing”) barcode scanning library. This library is released under the Apache License v2.0 and has spurred development of many different barcode scanners on many different platforms. The idea for PhraseMeme Scanner came when I saw there weren’t any good scanners available for Windows Phone 7 and then stumbled across the partial C# port of ZXing. Through a bit of testing I was able to modify the library to support Silverlight and Window Phone 7, and decided I would help push the library into a well maintained and supported state in the Silverlight world.
While the primary purpose for updating the library is to build the "Best barcode scanning app available" I also want to give back to the community and help others create great windows phone or Silverlight apps. ZXing has their own Google Code project, but that site is mainly devoted to Android or Java development, so I decided to store the code on Codeplex to get it some .Net love. This also means that I can use Mecurial instead of SVN/CVS, which so far has been a great experience and should be very helpful if anyone else decides to contribute patches or new features to the library.
So without further ado, please check out the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight ZXing Barcode Scanning Library based on the csharp ZXing port created by Suraj Supekar at revision 1202 in the SVN repository. Let me know what you think, and happy coding!
Update 3/11/2011: It looks like the project is getting a lot of interest from developers with over 6,000 page views and 750 total downloads in the last few months. This is probably due to the various tweets on twitter and a blog post from Rudi Grobler about reading barcodes on WP7 using the Silverlight ZXing port. That blog post was mentioned on This Week in Channel 9, which totally made my day even if it was only talked about for 40 seconds and never even mentioned my name. Still… pretty wicked cool