An Unofficial StyleForum iPhone Reader

Hi friends!
As an iPhone owner & recent SF enthusiast, I have often found myself thinking, while browsing SF on said iPhone, "This is slightly inconvenient! I have to occasionally move my fingers to make text legible. I wish I didn't have to do that."
Rather than more sensibly emailing the SF admins and asking if there were a mobile skin or something similar they could just switch on, I took it upon myself to build a horrible contraption that turns SF iPhone-friendly. In the interest of saving other iPhone owners the trauma of also having to occasionally move their fingers, I present it here:
http://sfmobi.bigtoast.in/
As the title suggests, this is completely unofficial and mostly unsupported. Use at your own risk. Availability subject to my being able to afford hosting. &c.
Here are some questions I might ask in your no doubt beautiful shoes, answered!

How does this thing work?
Very briefly: it passes requests for pages you send it on to StyleForum proper, fetches the page you've requested, and rebuilds it in mobile-friendly manner.

What's with that ugly URL?
It's the one provided by default by my host. I haven't shelled out for a domain name yet. I'll edit this post once I've got a proper domain name sorted out.

What's with the ugly everything?
Apologies -- I'm a software developer, not a graphic designer. Any suggestions on prettying things up will be very gratefully accepted.

Why can't I log in and post?
Re. the former: you can!

Re. the latter: coming soon!

Soon!

Am I really meant to trust my login details to you?
Short answer: yes, but I am trustworthy!

Long answer: your login details aren't stored anywhere aside from your browser and SF"”the mobile reader just receives your login credentials from your browser and passes them straight on to SF.

That said, if I were evil it would only take a few lines of code to start storing login details. I'm not, though! But if I were evil, I would say that. Buyer beware.

Not a concern, presently, as you can't log in!

The iPhone sucks. Where is my Droid/Pre/Blackberry/whatever-the-heck SF reader?
Android & Pre phones use a WebKit-based browser, so (hopefully!) this should work as well on them as it does on the iPhone. For everybody else -- sorry! I only own an iPhone.

Bonus nerd question: What's this thing built out of?
It's written in Python and served by Apache and mod_wsgi. I use Werkzeug Flask and httplib2 for doing HTTP stuff, lxml for parsing SF's HTML, and Mako Jinja2 for templating.

Bonus nerd question #2: Can I see the code?
Sure, if you promise not to laugh. The source is on bitbucket. If you have Mercurial installed, the command for cloning the repo is:

hg clone https://[email protected]/zenbot/sfmobi

Click to expand...

Note that I am a bad developer and have not commented my code. Apologies. Patches are welcome!

Soon!

NICETIES
* When you're viewing a thread, tap the thread title to jump to the bottom of the page.
* (Related: this is an iPhone feature, but it's very handy and a lot of people don't know about it. Tap the iPhone's status bar to jump to the top of any page or application.)
* When you're in a forum, clicking the arrow to the right of a thread's title takes you to the last page of the thread.
* Tap a thread's page count to navigate to a specific page in that thread.

TO-DOS & OUTSTANDING ISSUES
* Logging in, posting, replying, etc. all need to be re-jiggered for the new system.
* B&S is completely broken.
* Unescaped characters outside the ASCII character set range (like my precious en dash) are being lost in translation.
* Whitespace between inline tags & text is occasionally being dropped.
* Am thinking of how best to build in not-strictly-thread-&-forum stuff (subscriptions, private messages, etc.).

Let me know if you run into any issues using it or have any other questions, feature requests or comments.

Updated: 2011-08-03. New system!

This is pretty cool

Signing into your SF account is now supported. Further information will be edited into the OP shortly!

(For the moment, this is just used to keep thread statuses"”read, replied-to, etc."”consistent across your logged-in browsing sessions, as well as allow access through the mobile reader to forums that require that you be logged in to view. The ability to reply to threads & create new ones from the mobile reader are still being worked on.)

Sweet, thanks!

Ya guys... The guy is upfront about the security issues, but i'd add that it wouldn't even require code to look at your login details and so you can inspect the page code but you'd still never know. If you use this, definitely change your SF password so that it is significantly different from any other accounts BEFORE you log in through that other site, and if you have any confidential data in PMs from other users, delete them first. Make your PW random. Don't use birthdates etc.

I'm gonna be honest. I don't like this at all. Also... The OP has 6 posts and the whole "i wouldn't tell you i could do this if I wasn't tryign to scam you" is pretty effective social engineering if you ask me... Since a big part of my job is information security, i'm naturally paranoid though. SF members are high-value targets for identity theft and this is as blatant a phishing attempt as I could imagine. How many users have their paypal account on the same email that's linked to SF and use the same password, etc?

Originally Posted by GQgeek

Click to expand...

Ya guys... The guy is upfront about the security issues, but i'd add that it wouldn't even require code to look at your login details and so you can inspect the page code but you'd still never know. If you use this, definitely change your SF password so that it is significantly different from any other accounts BEFORE you log in through that other site, and if you have any confidential data in PMs from other users, delete them first. Make your PW random. Don't use birthdates etc.

I'm gonna be honest. I don't like this at all. Also... The OP has 6 posts and the whole "i wouldn't tell you i could do this if I wasn't tryign to scam you" is pretty effective social engineering if you ask me... Since a big part of my job is information security, i'm naturally paranoid though. SF members are high-value targets for identity theft and this is as blatant a phishing attempt as I could imagine. How many users have their paypal account on the same email that's linked to SF and use the same password, etc?
This is all very sensible advice. Like I said"”buyer beware. Hopefully I'll prove myself trustworthy eventually.

i would like to say that the OP is an awesomely trustworthy guy, and my account hasnt been hacked at all!

in other words paypal me all your monies, for i have come across a haul of the elusive ultrasprezz-pantherella socks (you can wear your watch around them)!!

So who's using this now and how do you guys like it?

Originally Posted by Flieger

Click to expand...

So who's using this now and how do you guys like it?

I'll let you know as soon as I get an Android phone (whenever the Incredible is in stock again....).

I've edited a link to the source code into the OP. Fellow developers"”please be gentle.

Looks really good. Is there a way to jump to a specific page, like the last page and such? On these threads with 43 pages, it would be easier if we could navigate.

Originally Posted by limester816

Click to expand...

Looks really good. Is there a way to jump to a specific page, like the last page and such? On these threads with 43 pages, it would be easier if we could navigate.
When you're in a forum, tapping the arrow to the right of a thread title jumps you to the last page (clicking the title takes you to the first).

Jumping to specific pages aside from the last isn't something I thought to add, but I'll add it to my to-dos!

It works on Android too. Cool, thanks

Originally Posted by aj_del

Click to expand...

It works on Android too. Cool, thanks
Good to know, thanks!

Originally Posted by limester816

Click to expand...

Is there a way to jump to a specific page, like the last page and such?
Now possible! Tap a thread's page count and you can enter a page number to jump to.

Testing replying...