After a long hiatus Russell Beattie is back with a new service called Mowser. Mowser is a combination of services related to the mobile web. There’s a transcoder that will redraw your favourite websites into a mobile-ready version on-the-fly, a list of popular Feeds and a collection of mobile-ready websites.

For me it is particularly interesting due to the transcoder as it’s related to some work I’ve done at Volantis. The transcoder will basically take an existing web-site and, using a bunch of set design rules and algorithms, re-write it’s code so that it is ready for a mobile browser. This has been seen before with Skweezer and Phonifier. However Mowser has been developed by a guy who knows a thing or two about the Mobile Web and the features emphasise this.

First of all the transcoder is clever enough to recognise when a website has a specific handheld stylesheet set in its Html header (when a webmaster has specifically designed a css file for handheld/mobile devices and indicated in his code that he wants it used). This makes perfect sense as it displays the page in the way the creator intended and should generally create a better result than transcoding.

The second cool feature is the ability to include Admob adverts in a transcoded page. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your code and the ads will appear in the mobilised page. So not only will Mowser give publishers an easy way to create a mobile-ready website, it will also give them a way to make some cash from it.

Another feature is the use of keywords. When developing for the Mobile Web it’s always useful to implement anything that will reduce the amount of text a user has to enter and this is done with preset Keywords in Mowser. Most are easy to guess (am for Amazon) but there is also a list of keywords available. This can also be used in a from such as “am Tarek” which will search Amazon for the term “Tarek” and essentially removing a step in the search process.

Now it’s important to mention that Mowser has just been released so it will have some issues. Some of the transcoding isn’t perfect, especially on some heavier pages, but over time this will improve as more people try and access more sites. There is a Forum set-up where people can discuss various issues and I’m sure Russ would encourage people to post any issues they’ve found with the service. Right now he seems to be working hard fixing up various things (When I started typing this post this blog had some weird characters displayed after going through Mowser but now it’s fixed) so the sooner you report them the better. A Chat room is also available for users which might be useful if you are having simple issues.

Russ is also adding more features so you might want to post any suggestions you might have on the forums. Personally I’d like to see a white-list function so that sites which are mobile ready or have known mobile version can skip the transcoding process. This is partially taken care of by recognising the availability of a handheld stylesheet but this doesn’t work for sites like yahoo.com which are device aware. Sites like Amazon.com could be redirected to amazon.com/access and yahoo.com could just be sent through to the phone skipping the transcoding process completely.
No matter which features are added in the future, Mowser is already a very useful tool and a welcome addition to the Mobile Web. You might want to subscribe to the blog feed to keep up-to-date on what’s going on.

[via Mobhappy]