I was checking my Twitter updates today via Twitterrific and an ad for Swift appeared in the stream of tweets. I clicked the ad because it promised a quick setup of a mobile Web site using RSS feeds. I've been looking for a Drupal theme that "mobilizes" my site for handsets (and iPhone), but none are completed yet, or able to do what I need right now (iUi is close though). So, I figured I'd give Swift a try and see what could be done in a few minutes.

It took about ten minutes and my mobile site was up and running. Simply input your feed URL(s), customize the colors, add a header and/or footer, and you are ready to go. The service is free, and a single ad is placed at the head of the mobile version of the site. I can live with that, but for those who cannot, $10 per month will get you an ad-free site.

It only took another five minutes or so to log into my host's control panel, add a couple of subdomains (for internal links on my regular site), and then upload some redirect pages to the various subdomains and the .mobi domain for my site that point the browser to the Swift version. Quick and simple...maybe five minutes more.

Given that I didn't feel like writing my own Drupal theme (I'm lazy, and I haven't ever written a Drupal theme from scratch) to get this accomplished, and that the mobile version of the site only needs to re-post, in a mobile-friendly format, the feeds for my site, Swift seems to be a good choice for me right now. I recommend it to others with similar requirements.

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Below are the boring details, in case others are interested in what I'm doing. I like subdomains, so I created iphone.metzcher.com and mobile.metzcher.com (why not? subdomains are free anyway). The redirect pages in these domains point to metzcher.mobi, which points to metzcher.swiftmob.com (the Swift site).

Yeah, lots of jumping from one place to another, but I want one domain to go to the mobile site, and everything else is just an alias and can jump to that domain. It's less to remember to change later if I do something different in the future.