Topic on User talk:ABaso (WMF)

HI Adam. If there is a better person to whom I should address this question, then please feel welcome to redirect me.

I am trying to find a quick and convenient means to look at how Wikisource pages would appear in mobile mode, however, trying to play with the page in the web, then pull out a phone and look at the page, especially with our typically long urls, is just painful. Are you able to suggest a means from the web to quickly drag a url to have a good indication of how a page would like in a mobile format on a mobile device?

Saying this as WS as an editor is so web-browser based, and I think that we are struggling to give a good web option, nor are we even aware of how our traffic arrives and views. Historically we probably are very focused on our editing efforts and content, and not outwardly focusing on the view.

Thanks if you can help.

Hi @Billinghurst , thanks for waiting. I was out on vacation for a while.

There are a couple tricks:

One is to click the "Mobile view" link from the page footer. That essentially places you on the so-called "mdot" subdomain so that the page is rendered for the mobile form factor.

Another is to use the developer tools in the browser. Usually you can search for something like developer tools mobile mode <browser name> in a search engine for more details on how to use those. Such browser functionality usually lets you get a representation of the page at a particular screen dimension, and sometimes it's even possible to change the User-Agent string sent by the browser from such tools (there are also a number of user-agent switching extensions/plugins for most browsers for this purpose).

If you'd like an even better emulation of browser behavior, you might try downloading something like Android Studio and XCode, which both allow you to run an OS simulator/emulator with a mobile browser very similar to what runs on Android and iOS phones in fact (although they're running on your computer, which likely has better computing performance than a phone).

If you'd like to arrange for some time for a Hangout Meet to discuss further, please do email (I'm user abaso on the wikimedia.org domain) and I'd be happy to step through some other tricks and tips.

Hope this helps somewhat!