Recently I’ve been using Django, a high-level python Web Framework, to create a website complete with login authentication, oAuth RESTful API calls, and a MySQL database. I also added a mobile layout depending if the user decides to visit our page using a mobile browser with the help of the minidetector middleware application that detects if the user is on a mobile device.
Initially, I had the question on how would I test my mobile site if I was doing all this on my local machine? I didn’t want to save my changes to the server and then view it on my mobile device so I looked for something better.
I then found the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox. This plugin allows me to simply choose the type of agent I want my browser to behave as. This way, I could easily view my mobile version of the site when I changed my user agent to the iPhone 3.0 option.
When I was able to see my mobile layout working as it should, I thought I hadn’t. Reason being is that I wished I was a better designer. Coding up the content and how to display it isn’t that difficult, but making it look good, well thats another story.
