I haven't updated this site for some time, mostly since I've been spending a lot of time lately learning Japanese and I had a hard time finding time for other hobbies together with it. However I'm getting better at managing my time and I found some time to make a WAP version of my website, which you can browse on your old phone from the 2000s!
WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a protocol that was used for mobile websites in the 2000s. Today it's mostly forgotten since modern smartphones can easily handle full HTML pages. You might think browsing the internet on a phone is a modern thing, but most 2000s phones had a WAP browser! However, WAP didn't really take off in many countries since mobile data tended to be very expensive. These phones also used 2G or 3G for loading sites, so WAP sites were slower than modern mobile internet.
There is WAP 2.0, which uses a subset of XHTML and WAP 1.0 which uses a different markup language called WML (Wireless Markup Language). Almost all WAP phones can access WAP 1.0 sites, a lot can access WAP 2.0 ones but some older ones can't. Therefore, I made the WAP version of my site in WML. WML is an interesting language, having some features designed for phones which don't exist in HTML, it even has its own scripting language! XHTML allows richer decoration though, so I might make a WAP 2.0 version in the future too. Another reason I might do that is there are some phones by NEC that for some reason support WAP 2.0 sites but not WAP 1.0!
WAP sites use their own image format, WBMP. It's a dead simple monochrome bitmap pretty much exactly like 8-bit computer bitmaps. If you've ever made graphics for something like a TI-84 or Game Boy, WBMP is encoded basically exactly the same. Aside from the 2-color limit, most 2000s phones can't display images wider than 96 pixels without scrolling, which means there isn't much detail to work with. Therefore, the WAP version of my site is mostly without images, although it has some heavily dithered ones. Most of my articles won't be the same without detailed images, but I think being able to read the text of an article on an old phone can be handy ^_^ Aside from the images, most things on my site are fully usable on the WAP version.
Some of my articles have Japanese characters, which most Western phones from that era cannot render. To work around that, I either displayed the characters as images or simply wrote in romaji.
Thanks to Hutch3G for helping me test the WAP site on multiple phones!!