unwiredben

Occasionally, I'll find a page that just won't render well using the Treo's web browser, Blazer. Often, it will look OK, then when the CSS is applied at the end it will go all wonky. (I'm looking at you, Wikipedia!)

I've been following a mobile startup called Mowser for the last few months, and I found myself manually invoking their reflow engine from time to time to make pages more readable. I'd go to the Page Info, copy the URL to the clipboard, then add the Mowser prefix before it.

This afternoon, I realized I could automate this using a bookmarklet, a chunk of Javascript that lives in a bookmark. In Blazer, they don't work directly from the "Go to a URL" bar, but they do work if invoked from a bookmark, so I made one to "Mowserize" a page.

Here's how you can do this:

1. Open the Bookmarks view
2. Select a blank bookmark to bring up the edit screen.
3. Title the bookmark "Mowserize" or something similar.
4. For the URL, enter this text, replacing the original text:

   javascript:window.location.href="http://mowser.com/web/"+unescape(window.location);

If you've got that entered correctly, then when you hit a page that Blazer just handles poorly, you can just go to bookmarks, select this one, and get a nicely formatted version that works great in Blazer's Netfront-powered HTML engine.