I love contributing and have been doing so quietly for
Many years. But I just wish there were a way to have FR meet the phone and tablet world. It makes me sad that I can’t even freep on my phone because the font is either too small or else you can’t see the sides of the lines.
I always wonder how much it would cost to adjust it or change the format. There are many forums where you can see everything in a decent sized font, upload pics and gifs quickly, use html, quote things in clear obvious blocks, and FR always stays the same.
Content on FR is superlative (depending on who’s commenting, but usually). But the structure is outgrown. The search feature doesn’t work. When you click away on a link and return,you don’t return to where you left so you have to search for it, and it just isn’t handy for mobile use.
What would it take to make some changes to bring it up to date?
Good point, a Free Republic app to make all that easier would be nice. Couldn’t we just rip off some other open source app??
Try the Opera browser. They have both an Opera Mini browser and an Android version that might be able to help. Give them a try -they are free, after all.
www.opera.com
The most I've ever had to do was double tap the screen to enlarge text, my eyes were never so great to begin with and age certainly isn't helping lol.
Don't need a special phone app, I've seen some forums offer them, I've tried them, none seem to offer anything worthwhile. If somebody could make a case for an Android app I'd listen, but I can't imagine anything except local caching that couldn't be implemented server-side and a basic web browser.
You know, most browsers have an enlargement function for those sites which you have difficulty reading. I use the Opera browser and it not only has a quick keyboard shortcut for that, there is another one for fit-to-screen as well. Shift-click on a link will open it up in a new tab and jump to it, and Ctrl-click will open it in a background tab. Or use the menubar. Try it, it's really quite handy -especially the menubar for most operations.
The "search" function has never been FR's most salient feature, but I usually bypass it by using the ixquick.com search engine and including FreeRepublic in the keywords to search which works quite well. The Pings and Mail notifications on the post pages no longer function either but that is not really a problem. They used to turn red whenever you get a new post to you or FReepmail but they stopped functioning years ago. John could probably drop them from the pages if he wished to and it would not affect how I read or post, but they are not a necessary function of the FR experience.
The notifications work just fine in the Index page when you refresh so no worries really.
Other than that, one of the big selling points here has always been the simplicity of the site which makes it quick to load, refresh, browse, and post. More "features" added on will begin slowing it down, which is not good for those of us with limited net capabilities.