Tag Archive for 'Google'

James Little on the Web

Published
by
James Little
on March 14, 2009
in web
. 1 Comment

You can find me involved with lots of stuff online, here are some of my favourites:

James Little, Linkedin

Flickr is my favourite photo sharing service. I’m also quite a fan of their photo map that allows you to position photos of your travels anywhere in the world.

YouTube is on of the video content services that don’t pay for your content – that isn’t google way. But they still dominate online video and you can find most music videos and funny snippets here.

Facebook is the “now” social network, I’m also on Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, ShareMyNZ, OldFriends and several others; but most people I know are on Facebook. If you would like to connect please include a message explaining why, it’s usually advisable to only conenct with people you know.

Linkedin is a more professional social network, if you would like to be connected please offer me a job.

Last.fm is a really cool music library that you can use to find hot new stuff or cool old stuff – and to see what your friends, colleagues and random people are listening to; and what you listened to yesterday, this can be used to focus you to new music that fits your tastes, like google search tailors searching to match your clicks.

Twitter was one of the first micro-blogging applications. It doesn’t allow you to use more than 140 characters and it does allow you to SMS updates. Handy for people covering events and has been used in conjuction with Google maps to provide live updates on natural disasters.

Stumbleupon is my favoured bookmarking application, I’ve used others like Digg, Delicious, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0; but Stumbleupon has the quickest tagging mechanism – someone else has already done it. And Stumbleupon has the stumble feature. Unfortunately stumbleupon is unaware that some content isn’t english (though you can select other languages) and everything gets garbled as Latin1.

L10n: localisation of WordPress

Published
by
James Little
on September 16, 2008
in web
. 1 Comment

Application localisation has caught my interest recently, for many years it was satisfactory to create applications that only understood (or expected) simplified character sets. Even though there were often cases where such an application would fail, where words or names are borrowed from other languages.

The question for me now is “How can I publish in multiple languages?” I have chosen WordPress as my content management engine. Can it succeed internationally?

When you start searching for multi-lingual or bilingual wordpress, you are likely to end up on the WordPress codex pages. You may also be wondering what it means. These pages will show you how to get WordPress specifically in your languages, i.e. German WordPress, French WordPress. They also tell you how you can help and they link to places to go.

The WordPress pages: Translating WordPress and WordPress in Your Language. If your language is not listed in WordPress in Your Language, you can also try the WordPress Language File Repository. I found the WordPress Language File Repository to be the easiest location for retrieving *.po and *.mo files.

*.mo files can be used by WordPress to render your blog in the correct language if a visitor arrives that is not as familiar to your language. They don’t really help you display your blog in a different language, unless you have lots of registered users that use the admin facilities of your blog.

You can create your own *.mo files for plugins and templates, these will be more useful to attract foreign visitors. A useful tool for managing your localisation capabilities is the Codestyling Localization, wordpress plugin.

It is very good at visualising localisation and you can turn it on and off as you please. The process of using the plugin to create *.po files is to painful, unless you have a very small plugin or template.

So how would you create translation *.po files? Go to the WordPress Language File Repository and download the *.po and *.mo files for your version of WordPress and your desired language locales.

I also wanted something for the actual content.
Polyglot2
can be used to work out the users preferential locale and if that is available, display content in that locale. Unfortunately this plugin will only pick up the user locale if it matches a set of prepared locales. The plugin only uses two letter locales, so there are some limitations. You are also forced to write the translations directly into the same post, limiting the number of translations and the size of the possible articles.

A better WordPress plugin for multilingual blogging called Gengo. This tool allows you to manage multiple languages, creating relationships of translation groups. This allows you to produce multiple streams of content from the same blog in multiple languages. If you want to assign translations it is simply a matter of selecting the post that you have a new translation for.

I have created content in the following languages to demonstrate:

  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Hindi
  • Chinese
  • Japanese
  • Arabic

I’m really impressed with the design of this bilingual spanish/english magazine http://www.kprensa.com/. I don’t know what plugins they have used. But they have done a good looking job.

Update (2008-12-17): I’ve dropped multilingual support on this blog. I can’t communicate in multiple languages anyway. It was purely a very time consuming experiment, which I will continue to be interested in.

Friends connect through Google, OpenSocial, Yahoo and Facebook

Published
by
James Little
on September 12, 2008
in web
. 0 Comments

Providing connectivity quickly and easily to web services appears to be the next battleground.

Google has delivered Friend Connect, named very similar to Facebook connect. However the latter appears to be a more useful approach, Facebook allows quick activation of user website accounts using limited Facebook account information. Google Friend connect only seems to allow users to play with widgets attached to the website.

There may be power in that, allowing your website to build its own OpenSocial network, but I don’t see how it enriches any self-respecting website. The google article “A friend connected web” talks up the features, which are cool but specifically targeted at a non-technical audience.