Hello!

I apologise for not uploading a blog last month.  I was ill for a few days and before I knew it, March was over!  I thought I would upload a short post now and hopefully get something more comprehensive to you soon! 

This belated March post is certainly not my normal kind of content, but I think you’ll find it quite life changing to be honest!  I sometimes get phone calls from people who are trying to find a particular product or page on the Tiny Pioneer website, but can’t see it.  If you generally visit from your computer, you will probably find this surprising, as I have done my best to make the website as easy to navigate as possible!  I used to be worried by these calls, but now I always know what the problem is:  the caller is viewing the website on their mobile phone and does not know The Secret of the Three Lines. 

Most websites nowadays come in two or three sizes: full size for computers; small size for mobile phones; and sometimes an additional medium size for tablets.  To make websites easier to view on small screens, the main menu is usually displayed differently on phones and tablets.  An astonishing number of people, including quite young people, do not seem to be aware of this.  Effectively they land on a website’s homepage and then don’t know how to get to anything that is not linked in the main body of this page.  I have included a picture to show how the Tiny Pioneer homepage looks on my own computer compared to my own mobile phone. 

You will notice that unlike on a computer, the phone version has no links above the green announcement box to navigate to Ancestral Supplements, Desert Harvest, Tiny’s Blog and so on.   This is because they would take up too much space.  However, instead you will see a box with three lines at the top of the screen as shown in the picture below. 

If you click that box, a whole extra menu will open up as shown below and from there you can easily navigate to lots of other parts of the website! 

This is not just a Tiny Pioneer thing – this is a lots and lots of websites thing!  You know how the universal symbol for ‘play’ on an electronic device is a triangle?  Or the universal sign for ‘stop’ is a square?  Well, nowadays, those three lines on websites are pretty much the universal sign for ‘open up the whole menu, please’.  So if you browse the internet mainly on your mobile device you don’t know The Secret of the Three Lines, you are missing out on a whole lot of the internet!  You’re doing the online equivalent of window shopping, without ever actually going into a shop! 

Usually the three lines appear only on mobile versions of websites.  It is not normally something the website owner has any control over – it just happens by itself.  I think it’s technically called being ‘mobile optimised’ and it’s a feature that most website hosting services include as standard.  Some websites use three lines instead of a written menu even on computer versions, to keep homepage text to a minimum and allow images to be the focal point. 

You might wonder why I am bothering to write a post about this.  It’s because lots of people who visit Tiny Pioneer have complex health conditions which require them to do a lot of independent research.  Often, this is done in bed on a mobile device – I speak from personal experience of Googling my own health issues at 3am!  If people don’t really know how to operate the internet from their mobile devices, they are potentially missing out on some very helpful information and resources, so I thought I would write a short post to address this. 

I realise that I’m probably preaching to the converted here.  If you’ve been able to access this post, you’re either browsing from your computer or else you already know The Secret of the Three Lines.  I suppose if you’re browsing from a computer, you might not have known, so perhaps you’ve learned something!  Please spread the word though!  I know it’s not specific to chronic health issues, but you might teach someone something that will come in useful for them later.    

I’m not a Pioneer for nothing, you know! 

Tiny x