It has been a fairly busy holiday season from a work perspective but over the holidays I found some hours to get some much needed work done. I have gotten on a productivity and efficiency kick that started with my change to the Google Reader. The more I use this reader, the more I like it.

 

One reason I made this switch you may recall was because I want to take my RSS feeds on the go and the Google Reader works well with my phone.

 

But I now have another dilemma. I don’t always want to open my mobile browser to the Reader. I have a handful of links I like to use but I needed a new menu system that would allow me quickly access to the links I want.

 

I first tried customizing Google Mobile to do this but it wasn’t very flexible.

 

I then tried designing a mobile menu page using Google Pages as it allows rapid page creation. What I found was that using pages created in this fashion interfered with various Google services. Whenever I clicked on a link on my phone from the service it would give me some mobile related error message and then give me a non-mobile formatted result. It even forced me have to enter in my password for Reader each time I clicked on the link from the Pages menu. It was if cookies weren’t being read.

 

Then I decided to just use Microsoft Word and create the menu and export the HTML file to a folder on my blog site. I now have a super-efficient menu allowing me access to just the content I want. Here is how the mobile menu looks:

 

Unless otherwise specified the links are all Google links. In other words Maps is a link to Google Maps.

 

Even though the file is under 10k in size, I then decided to copy it to my phone to have even faster access to the menu. I now have a rapidly opening menu allowing me access to any link at lightening speed.

 

The way I did this was as follows... Copy the file called “mobile-home.html” to your “My Documents” folder and on your Windows Mobile browser enter:

 

file://\My%20Documents\mobile-home.html

 

Now you have a lightening fast menu accessible from your mobile phone.

 

Please note I may update this menu as time goes on so you are welcome to save a copy of it if you find it perfect the way it is.