I had been without a cell phone for a while, when I picked one up the other day. For a couple years, I was working out of my home, and I wasn't using my cell phone and just paying a lot for not using it.

I still don't have a ton of need for a mobile phone, but I have more need now, and so I just got the Audiovox Vox 8500 phone with a Virgin Mobile, pay as you go plan, which seems dandy and inexpensive for the way I plan to use it.

Today, I came across this forum thread which has advice on simple hacks for how to use this phone (on Virgin Mobile) to get free WAP access to the whole web. So, I got myself set up and browsing the WAP web, and also created two new blojsom flavors in WML format so I could check-in on my blog via my mobile phone.

I like to check-in on my site and make sure my blog is up and running, and also check-in to see if there are new comments or trackbacks. So, I created this wml view of my blog homepage, which I use to make sure my blog is up and running, and also link to individual posts.

Each individual post show a count of each of its comments and trackbacks, and links to another wml view of the comment / trackback authors and the times of their comments / trackbacks. Here is the comment / trackback wml view for this post.

(Also, here are the Velocity template sources for the main wml and the detailed wml flavors I created for blojsom.)

At this point, I don't show the whole comment or trackback. I am still experimenting to see how I will use this on my phone. My main use for now is just to peek at who might be commenting on my blog while I am away from my desk. I might add in the full comment / trackback text later.

So, the thread I link to above has good links to a number of WAP sites out there. There really are a lot of useful WAP sites available. I have created a WAP homepage for myself on icite.net, and will be updating it with the links I use.

Already though, I have been playing with the Google wap and Yahoo! wap sites, including Yahoo! IM and weather. (I'll have to try posting to my blog via blojsim and Yahoo! IM.)

WapCatalog.com and WapCentralNews.com both seem like good indexes to the WAP sites out there.