August 2016

Now that I have upgraded to a smartphone, it has become obvious to me that our websites are definitely not handheld mobile friendly. Shortcomings we have noted include small text size and flaky mobile application plug-in support for our various Flash® animations.

I have already taken the first step toward compatibility by replacing our animated banner with a static image. Next steps will be (as we get to it) replacing the little animated doodads with static images, or removing those that do not have a static equivalent, including the Never Forget animated tribute.

It troubles me to do away with this animation which has been a memorial to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on this site for over ten years, but the traffic count on the hit indicator at the right under the animation has been diminishing steadily. When the hit counter passed sixty million in February of 2010, the hits per hour were nearly 1300; when the counter passed ninety million, the hits per hour had diminished to 529. The current hits per hour is under 200, so it is time to phase the tribute out.

Image: How this site looks on my new Samsung Galaxy mobile

I will clean up the incompatible items on all of our sites over a period of time (read when I get around to it) and begin looking at ways to detect device type and to issue a compatible format. This latter effort may take a while since I use a very old version of WordPress and I will have to customize things in the old code rather than upgrading to a new version incompatible with the current database structure.

It might just be too much work to convert the whole site, so I might incorporate a mobile only splash page that directs the mobile user to switch to a larger tablet or a full-size computer screen. I have only begun to research the changeover, so stay tuned.