Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

Short story:
Last weekend I moved the content of my old Java ME open source software site to a new Open Source Softwares for Mobile Phone blog. Initially it will be focused on Java (Java ME, Android), but will be extended to other major platforms like Symbian, Windows Mobile, even iPhone.

Long story:
I have been maintaining a collection of Java ME open source projects since 2004. That site contains simple HTML pages, which are cumbersome to update. I was thinking about overhauling it for quite a while. My first thought is to use a Digg like software, so everybody can register and submit project. I tried both Pligg and PHPDug. Pligg is feature-rich and powerful. But theme selection is still small. Customizing it by myself could be time-consuming (I am not a web design guy). PHPDug is small and simple. Theme customization should be doable. After I tried it, I found that its pages are heavily based on tables. It is still a little buggy and does not contain all the features I would like to have.

So now I am back to WordPress. Comparing to Pligg and PHPDug, the advantage is obvious. It has a large amount of free themes/plugins available. It has a large user community. It supports tag, category and search, which I need the most. And I used it for this blog since 2004. Thus I could focus on the content not the software configuration.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me about open source Java ME projects before. Without your help, I could not build this list myself. At this moment it has 156 (Java ME) projects and will keep growing!