Mobile Access Portal FAQ

Contents:

Documentation on other pages:

What?

Access to common search sites and email etc, ASAP.

Why?

On some phones, eg my phone, the search box in Wikipedia disappears and you have to edit bookmarks to search it. You have to hunt around to find Hotmail access, the options for lo-graphics search on the BBC are hidden, and you have to hunt for undocumented features to enter quote marks and apostrophes.

In short, mid-range smartphones are a pain when you're in a hurry, and most of the main search sites aren't adopted for them properly.

This fills the gaps.

Why is this page indented?

Heading levels are normally delimited by varying text sizes in the headings. Because is this hard to make out on small displays, here it's indented as well.

And now the headings are coloured, as well. 'Different levels in different colours, too, now, too, (now, too, now...)

How?

Type your search query in, hit the button for your service, and you're away.

To jump to a service's homepage, submit a blank query, or use the quick links along the bottom. The buttons are for self-searchable sites, the links are for direct homepages, like private email (which they don't let you search).

Transcoding

Can't type quotes? Use $ for quotes and & for apostrophes.

If you want $ and & literals in your search, untick the "Transcode" box, or press 0 when not editing the search field. Press 1 to jump back to the search field.

Some phones give you an extended option when you hold # down for a few seconds when entering text. Not that they tell you that in the manual; oh no, that would be too easy.

Quote All

Fed up having to try quotes around everything, then removing them again? Tick Quote All, and searches will behave as if you quoted everything.

Press 2 when not editing the search field. Press 1 to jump back to the search field. Why 2? Well " is above the 2 key, and 0 & 1 were already used...

This will override the Transcode option, and ignore any existing quotes in your input. Untick it, and things revert to how you left them.

Contents

Enigmatic Labels

A list of all the buttons and what they do.

The buttons are split into three groups, delineated by colour, which is the most compact way of distinguishing groups of similar items:

If you use a button when with no text entered, you will go to that service's homepage instead, or the closest similar relevant default function.

Plain Search

Straightforward direct lookups, eg Google, Wikipedia, etc.

Google
Jump straight into mobile google, without waiting for their page to load or working out how to get their mobile version working on your phone.
define
Google Dictionary, aka define:word from their front page.
taptu
A kind of mobile Google. A bit like this, in a way, except less ergonomic, probably because they can afford much nicer phones.
flickr Text
flickr search for descriptions photos.
flickr Tags
flickr search keywords for photos.
flickr Recent
Search recent uploads to flickr. Stuff's uploaded there far more frequently than you can refresh.
flickr Groups
Names of groups in flickr. Groups include member photos and discussion about them. They may be open to all, or strictly moderated and controlled.
BBC News
Results from the BBC, which everybody seems to end up quoting. Results for anytime, not just recent ones.
all News
All media results in the last week, including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, gossip, graffiti, etc.
Wikipedia
An all-in-one-page text-only [experimental] filter of Wikipedia. More useful than Wapedia when you don't need the graphics. Further filtering may arrive one day.
wapedia
Paginated version of Wikipedia with reduced-size graphics.
Thesaurus
Dictionary definitions of words, along with synonyms and antonyms.

Social Networks

Search all the main social networking sites. If you are logged in to them at the time, more relevant results will be returned.

facebook
The standard facebook search. Blank means your facebook homepage, or the login screen if you're not logged in.
Bebo
Bebo search / homepage / login.
twitter
Twitter search / homepage / login.
Buzz
Google Buzz search via Buzzy.com / homepage / login.

Technical

Stuff for programmers, admins, and webmasters.

All the domain-associated options (whois, Browse, View Source, and assoc. domains) work equally well with or without the http://, www., /foo/bar.html bits, and will add/ignore them as necessary. This means you can jump back to the Portal and use another service without editing your query.

whois
Lookup www.whosethis.com, if he exists.
This is a universal whois service, so you don't need to work out which ones to use for different countries.
Browse
Filter online content to optimise for mobile use:
Speed up your handheld's data rate, typically by 500%.
View Source
Display the source code of a website, with syntax colouring, and cool features to jump to the top and bottom of the page!
  • Syntax colouring fruitiness.
  • Comprehensive server error analysis and HEAD info.
  • Automatic filetype-detect, and code dump mode for binary files (but not php or hidden files - duh), text files, CSS, javascript, and mixed-mode capability (correct CSS and javascript syntax colouring inside HTML mode).
Head request
Like the server data you get with View Source, but without waiting for the source to come up - perfect for debugging very large pages.
assoc. domains
Find out what other websites and things companies run. Things running off the same server, traffic analysis, the market price of similar domains (ours is $10,000 - whoo-hoo!).
IP lookup
Information about Internet Protocol addresses, eg 12.34.56.78
Generally lists servers, associated system and companies, contact email, nameservers, and all the stuff whois usually provides.
Hit a blank query for your own IP address. You can search that, too.
php function
Wossat function call do?
Beta feedback
Direct feedback without all that tedious mucking around with Bistro etiquette. Your search box query is submitted as feedback. You may only post up to 10 comments per day per machine, or you won't be able to post any more for the rest of the day. Spammers are detected by frequency and content, and will be blocked, but still may use all the other functions of the Portal.
If you are blocked (or, more likely, if the feature is still under Alpha test), the button won't appear and the system won't accept your comments.

Informative Labels

There are also plain, non-interactive, links along the bottom. Through these you can jump directly into your email. Currently supporting Hotmail, gmail, and Yahoo mail, as well as the "Click CEOP" button.

Also around is informative text, including links to various portions of this documentation page, current clock and calendar information, and links to this help documentation and adverts.

The temporal information is a particularly helpful (although simple to provide) core feature, because mobiles stop displaying this when you need it!

Contents

Privacy?

Total. Not even traffic stats are collected, largely because I'm fed up with stupid spammers targeting search boxes and filling up the "Did you mean aardvarks?" dictionaries with junk.

Empty error log files are sometimes generated, which do not contain user-identifiable information, but do contain lots of wasted space, and so are generally quickly downloaded and deleted whenever the sprout up.

Shortly you may be able to log in to a mobile version of *unch, but this will be separate from your account details on the desktop version, and we recommend you use the same username with a different password. The mobile version may alter data on your desktop account, but you have the option to opt out via the desktop version. Opting out would make the purpose of having a mobile account fairly pointless, and is largely there as a security measure, but it is important that you do have the choice.

So why is this why.php instead of why.htm?

Because the technicians put a cup of coffee down in the wrong place, and now the server won't honour proper file extensions, okay? To be fair, most of that's fixed now, but it was hard enough changing all the extensions to php while keeping all the subsites running, so I'm damned if anybody's changing back again.

Future?

Travel searches (now all under research (back burner)). Other searches if I find some which can be made to produce mobile-relevant output.

And lots of debugging, now (back) in Alpha! Alpha testing is where the programmer runs the tests. Beta is where the public report problems, and released is when all the big problems have been solved and only occasional minor problems are allowed to happen.

By this definition, facebook's been in beta for about five years, although they haven't admitted it yet. flickr also has introduced gamma (and now the BBC have copied them), a kind of beta mark II, where they're changing so much stuff they don't think it'll be bug-free for long enough, but they've finished developing the main interface.

Names

First this was just "Mobile Search Portal". Now it's "Mobile Access Portal", because that spell's MAP.

Recently noticed this word is one of the few that can be typed on a mobile keypad without repeat-tapping keys, due to it containing the only vowel available using that method. It is also the smallest nut in the jar, so we've settled on it as the final name afterall. It has stood the test of time and quoting, for the time it's had, anyway.

Previous possibilities considered were:

oogle
G-G-Guess who's gonna grumble about that one?!
RaMuSP
Rapid access Mobile use Search Portal.
"Rumpus", says the spelling-checker.
Rapid use mobile portal, um, searcher?
MuSE
Mobile use Search Engine
Trouble is, it isn't an search engine, it's a portal. Maybe a portal engine, at a stretch.
Munch
Something like Hunch, but different. Not literally "Munch", obviously, but a slicker word like it.
Slickr
Or a made-up word. Not "Slickr" literally, obviously, but a non-word much like it.

Please feel free to send in comments / grumbles / currency:

Contents

New Stuff

Features just keep piling up faster than we can document them!

Stuff So New it hasn't even come out of Alpha

Note: This also means you can't see it yet!

  • A link to display all shortform adverts, instead of the current random choice that happens to be displayed.
  • Extended View Source for javascript and CSS modes, and variable width [byte]codemode.
  • Clickable relative links
  • Redirects in HEAD Requests and View Source, including a list of redirects.
  • New section explaining the Alpha Rollback

Most Recently Added

New stuff so far includes:

  • Direct feedback button - So you can let us know what you think of the new service without all that tedious mucking around in facebook.
  • Flexible advert handling code, so we can add your advert to the stream (different ones appear at random) ASAP.
  • Quote All tickbox.
  • Lots more pages and options in mobile crunch, visual style in line with the desktop version, and lots of new links.
  • Results links from mobile crunch to Wikipedia now point to their wapedia equivalents, and ditto for the mobile version of social networking sites, Google, etc.
  • Name change: "mobile *unch" turned into "mobile crunch" for legal reasons. Nobody's been sued BTW! It's a result of careful communication and cooperation between SAtC and *unch Inc.
  • Google Dictionary, via the define button. Currently being used as a bugfix & interface enhancement for and in discussion with Google.

Known Issues

While it isn't fair to call them bugs, because bugs are things that either don't work at all, or that break the system, some features aren't working as smoothly as we would like at this time. It is not clear which these will be beforehand, and it is in the nature of setting things loose on the world that they will encounter conditions that cannot be replicated or tested for in the lab.

mobile crunch: Users can't log in yet
Login and page handling wrappers not closely integrated enough yet to mate together; security issues with five possible separate login models requiring simultaneous testing. This is more a "Yet to do" than a serious bug.
mobile crunch & search filter demo: Searches running slowly
If a keyword-only search is entered into the natural language searcher, it still attempts to formulate a keyword-only search and as a result makes two identical searches when it should make one, halving the speed of simple searches. This is more a "Yet to do" than a serious bug. (Fixed!)

For fixed issues, please see the most recent entries in the History section.

Status Summary

A list of all the button and links, and how stable they all are.

Rejected
  • Wikipedia (via Googlefilter)
    Chucked in favour of Wapedia, which has been renamed "Wikipedia", and then all reverted again.
Proposed or Looking For
  • MySpace
  • Buses
  • Trains
  • Flights
  • Ships
  • Locality
    (eg nearest Shops)
  • Directory Enquires
  • Link: Tiscali mail
  • TV Guide
  • Prisons
  • Taptu
Pending Addition & Being Worked Upon
  • Complex results generator
    for Buzzzy third party use
  • Summary Search Engine
    for Prisons & Google use
  • Selective Proxy Filter
    for various uses Here
  • Head request
  • Hunch
    This list of hunch functions is not yet comprehensive.
    • Hunch functions not covered yet:
      • Login
      • Search for results
      • Search for specific single question
      • THAY (Teach Hunch About You) topics
      • Show correlations between two topics
      • Predictive data
      • Cumulative population data
      • Recommended topics for you
      • Affiliate links in results
      • Action menu
      • Register/Login (desktop version via mobile)
      • ... And anything else the desktop version does that's not currently covered by the API.
    • Hunch functions covered but limited in some way:
      • Forum access (read only)
      • Hot topics by keyword
      • Helpful information about the current page
      • Helpful information about mobile crunch (aside from MAP help pages)
    • Hunch functions covered and fully working:
      • List categories
      • List topics in category
      • Search for a topic (to extend)
      • Recent topics
      • Train result (not visible until login ability available)
      • Equivalent main page
      • hunch blog
Won't Behave at all
  • Mavis (offline)
    Intended as a php replacement for Betsie, with extra domain-sensitive custom filtering. Except it won't work. It works with simple test data, but runs off for a sulk whenever given with real-world data to play with. This is very annoying and we have sent it to bed with no supper. We will try MODding Betsie instead.
  • fb group no.
    Facebook Group Number; for some reason this just won't work in mobile, and has been taken offline.
Working Well Enough But Still Being Added To
  • BBC News
  • all News
  • View Source (stable enough until upgrades)
  • IP lookup (stable enough)
  • php function
  • assoc. domains (stable enough)
  • Browse (stable enough)
Stable & Finalised
  • flickr Text
  • flickr Tags
  • flickr Recent
  • flickr Groups
  • facebook
  • Bebo
  • twitter
  • Thesaurus
  • whois
  • Beta feedback
  • Google
  • Google Dictionary ("define" button)
  • Link: Hotmail
  • Link: gmail
  • Link: Yahoo mail
  • Hunch (also [was] still being worked upon)
    Our mobile version is now called "mobile crunch". References to "Hunch" in general are separate. MAP is a separate project to mobile crunch.
  • Wikipedia
  • Wapedia (in theory)
  • Buzz
  • Link: CEOP "button"
    This has been formally approved by and registered with CEOP, as required.

Contents

Who?

Just some guy...

Back to the portal.