I have been working on the PDA friendly section of my site (http://atulchitnis.net/pda).

So far, it just allowed people to pick up the last few diary entries with their PDAs, using services like Avantgo or applications such as Plucker.

PDA usage is booming, and services that cater to PDAs are popping up every day. Just about every site worth its salt now has support for this, and I am hoping that eventually the “/pda” becomes a default option everywhere – it would make life so much easier for many people.

I didn’t realise just how many people were using my /pda section (also aliased to /palm for us hard-nosed PalmOS fans until I recently checked my server logs and saw that there is substantial traffic there every day!

Designing content for mobile devices can be a nightmare if you don’t have the necessary infrastructure – luckily I do, since most parts of my site are database driven anyway, so it is essentially just a bit of reformatting.

But there are also other requirements – PDAs are typically short on memory, low on resolution and often don’t even have colour, though things are changing a lot on those fronts.

Delivery of content has to be kept in mind as well – typically, a PDA users sync the content to their PDAs and disconnect from the net, to read the stuff offline later. It is important then to make sure that there are no broken links or missing content, because the user will not be able to connect back while reading the pages.

That is why I will try and add a little more content to my /pda section, not just teh diary, but also my most recent articles and other information that a normal web-visitor would easily have access to.

All this is part of a larger project of mine, that I have been working on for a while and that I hope to see become reality over the next couple of months.

For now, if you use a PDA, and have an Avantgo account, feel free to subscribe to my /pda channel by clicking here. Note: Avantgo limits such “custom channels”, so it is essentially first come first served.

If you use Plucker, then essentially you just have to tell it to pick up stuff from http://atulchitnis.net/pda.

And if you have a /pda channel yourself, drop me a line!