If you don’t do your blogging from an iPad, there’s one thing you might not realize about your WordPress blog. The “default settings” on your blog are programmed to send iPad viewers to a specialized “mobile view” of your blog called OnSwipe–and (speaking as an uber-frustrated iPad reader-of-blogs) the OnSwipe view is CRAP.

So I just wanted to take a moment to highlight the disadvantage to YOU, the blogger, of having your blog viewed in the OnSwipe format–and beg you to change your settings (also for the sake of ME, the reader).

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  The OnSwipe view is completely stripped of the theme you’ve used to personalize your blog. It shows the text and photos of your post against a white background. None of the theme design, none of your side-bar links, none of the options to visit your “about you” page… Nothing at all but your words on a white page. (Seriously, WordPress? If we wanted our work to look like that, we’d just be posting our word-processing documents…)

• Maybe of more concern to you (although the first point irritates me to no end) is the fact that there’s no option for an OnSwipe viewer to “like” a post or “follow” your blog. Nope, none. I can not follow your blog from the OnSwipe mobile view.
• To do anything beyond read the bare text of your post, I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the post (waiting for all the pictures and text to load), click on a link to “View Standard Site,” and then wait for the REAL blog to post in its all its wonderful technicolor personality. Yay! Only then can I use your navigational links, see your stats and profile, “like” a post, or “follow” your blog.

Why WordPress thought this mobile theme was a great idea, I can’t begin to imagine.  They bill it as “a beautiful app-like experience”… Pure.Bull.Malarkey.  I’ve already registered my complaints thoughts with WordPress, and I’ve already gotten my answer: OnSwipe is here to stay… Though they said they’ll take into consideration my plea suggestion that, if nothing else, they could give us, as individual readers, a chance to choose whether the blogs we view will load in OnSwipe or Standard view…

But since that hasn’t happened so far, I figure there’s one thing I CAN do, and that is to beg all of you, my readers (whose blogs I READ!) to take pity on me and please PLEASE take the two minutes to change your blog settings so your readers can go directly to the “real” version of your blog.  (Instructions below–I even made pretty pictures for you–it’s super-easy!)

I promise you, I’ll be doing a little happy-dance every time I open a blog and find it’s NOT taking me to the crap-ola white-page of an OnSwipe view.  (I also have this funny little feeling that other bloggers might like to KNOW that their default settings are preventing people from “liking” their posts or “following” their blogs… If you wanna spread the word…)  Thanks in advance to all of you, for making my blog-reading less frustrating!

How to disable the icky mobile settings: Click on “Appearance” at the left of your Dashboard.

1) Pick “Mobile,” select “No,” click update.

2) Pick “iPad,” UNcheck the box, click save.

And if you’d like to let other bloggers know how their posts are getting viewed by iPadders…