When I first started this blog, one of the main ideas was to present it in a format conducive for reading on portable devices, principally Palm Pilots. Since then that field has widened to include PocketPCs and other PDAs--even Palm Pilots aren't really called that anymore. The conduit for piping these contents to those devices was (and is) AvantGo. However, it's looking to me like that's a technological dead-end, with more portable devices accessing the net directly. I know how to check my email and browse a few portals like Yahoo and CNN using my mobile phone, for instance. With Treos and inevitable copycat devices merging handheld computers with mobile communications, that will no doubt be the way we'll read blogs or their descendants in the future. The not-too-distant future, either.
None of this technological crystal ball-gazing could have anything to do with the fact that I can't get MY computer to talk to MY Palm device using AvantGo, right? Right. Sheesh, it's been this way for a while, but recently I rolled up my sleeves, determined to straighten that out. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow involving help desks, emails to company reps, missing DLL files, and such. In the end I had to admit defeat, happy to just have a mostly-functional connection between the computers. I still can't get AvantGo to work (except on my home machine), but at least everything else does.
I tried looking into Plucker, a free license bit of software used for viewing web pages on PDAs. Its interface is smoother than when I first checked a few years ago, yet it's still kind of "techy" for someone who abandoned the leading edge a long time ago. In my first engineering job I used to go down to the company library over lunch hours to read PC Magazine, but now I need my 10yo son to explain which remote buttons to push to view a DVD. So Plucker ain't gonna work. (And maybe that sheds some light on my AvantGo troubles...)