One of the things that I have struggled to understand about Facebook and Twitter is the lack of permanence. These are fuzzy spaces where people can play and redefine themselves and make tangential jokes about the current context that don’t make sense years, months or maybe even days later. And yet, they are also spaces that define an online personality, affect job prospects and even get you in trouble with the law. They are like postcards, indexed and made available to the world.

(Interesting postcard link via Russell Davies.)

Defining ‘bilingual’

We wanted to be able to do the following:

• give the user a clean experience in their language of of choice, so they can navigate the site entirely in English or French, but switch between the two at will
• have a distinct url for each entry, with the url relevant to the language used (for example, the related posts “New Design” on the English site has the url
  http://www.nakedtranslations.com/en/2009/new-design
  while the French entry about the same thing is called “Y a du changement dans l’air” and has the url
  http://www.nakedtranslations.com/fr/2009/y-a-du-changement-dans-lair
• keep track of comments for each entry, split by language (so, French and English comments don’t get mixed up)
• link between blog entries of different languages

Choice of platform – Movable Type

The site uses Movable Type, which is certainly not my blogging software of choice. This is because MT allows you to have multiple blogs under the same login, and reference between them through Custom Fields. It also allows us to set up the language for one of the blogs to be French, while the other is English, making it easier to get blog entry dates to automatically use the right language and so forth. This allows us to have the proper urls for the language used, and link our blog entries between languages. MT has a lot of things going for it, but good documentation, a friendly user community, and a slick user interface are all missing from the mix. A fair amount of the documentation is out of date or missing a key element, and I was shocked by some of the defensive rudeness in the forums from people who said RTFM without pointing to the relevant bit of the FM or writing anything useful in the FM. Anyway…

But what about WordPress?

There are a lot of very nice looking WordPress plugins and tweaks that do similar things, but none that met our requirements entirely. The other thing that made me nervous about using WordPress was the degree of modification and tweaking required to get it working and I was concerned about maintanance with WordPress upgrades in future.

These are my notes about the plugins I found. Please keep in mind this was a few months ago and our bilingual definition is not the same as other people’s.

ZDMultiLang

http://blog.zen-dreams.com/en/zdmultilang/#4

WordPress plugin.
Works and is maintained. Allows easy switching between posts in different languages. Will probably work well with WordPress languages.
However, it does not let you specify different slugs for different languages, which will emphasise one language over the other. It requires you to set a primary language and then just enter translation for the other. This is neat, but doesn’t use WP’s post architecture. Again, neat, but I’m concerned about long term mainantance issues.

WP_Multilingual

http://made.com.ua/uk/works/wp/multilingual/

Not as well supported as ZDMultilang.
Requires FCKEditor
Allows for category translation
Again, not possible to change the slug.
It appears to not be actively maintained and it doesn’t work robustly enough. Nice idea, though.

Gengo
Looks like it would be good, but not stable at the moment

YammYamm
Doesn’t quite work with the latest WP.
Doesn’t link posts in different languages.
Does nicely allow for posts to all live in the posts directory properly, which of course means you can edit the slugs etc.

Basic Bilingual
Does not allow for different pages properly
Very basic.

Language Switcher
Doesn’t maintain the sense of proper bilingualism

WordFez
Switches text on the page. not what we want.

qTranslate
This is tricky – it holds all translations of the text in the standard fields, and filters output accordingly. Does not allow for different slugs, though.

xLanguage
All in the same entry, which seems nasty to me. Where do the comments live? Etc.

And the others?

I looked briefly, but seriously, at Textpattern, and suspect this would have done the job as well, if not better, than Movable Type. It seems to have plugins designed exactly for this purpose. I didn’t pursue this further because when we build the first version of this site a few years ago, MT was the software of choice and I didn’t want to add learning a new system into the mix, especially as my first investigations with Textpattern revealed quite a few areas of minor frustration that I would have had to address. Better the devil you know. In retrospect, and with the hassles I’ve had with MT, I’m not sure that was the right decision, but there we go.

Implementation

One of my key concerns was ensuring the templating system was as easy to keep track of as possible. I elected to use one set of templates for both blogs, referencing the files at the same location in MT’s template setup. This removed the risk of making a design change on one side but not the other. I then created a language template which gets included in every page, which sets PHP variables for all the static text on the page, with a version for French and a version for English. As the site gets published to static HTML (in the main), I was not too concerned about adding a lot of PHP language processing overhead for the template, since it only needs to do the work once.

The language file has entries like this:

$en["recententries"] = "Recent blog entries";
$fr["recententries"] = "articles récents";

And the template then uses these like this:

< ?=${$language}["recentcomments"];?>

To get the linking between blog posts, I installed the LinkedEntryCustomFields plugin (if
you go this route and use this plugin, you need to use the Pro version of MT, which is free to individual pro bloggers). This is set up to create a linked entry field for each individual entry on both blogs, and Céline has to select the related entry when she enters her new entries.

Here is more detailed implementation info, since it took me a while to gather all this, and it might help someone:

Use the Linked Entries plugin to allow you to create links between entries in different blogs.
Set up a French Version custom field in the English blog and an English Version field for the French blog.
If your Linked Entry is called english version, then you will probably want code like this on the French template.

Best to call your linking tags something like English Version and French Version, rather than using ‘entry’ keyword. This will make it easier when you have to code into templates and use ‘entry’ as a special term to access the entry info.

<mtifnonempty tag="entrydataenglish_version">
  English version: <mt :entrydataenglish_versionentry>
  <a href="<$mt:EntryPermalink$>"
    title="< $mt:EntryTitle encode_html="1"$>">
    < $mt:EntryTitle></a>
  </mt>
</mtifnonempty>

NOTE: The var name needs ‘entry’ at the end to access the correct link and text. In this example: entrydataenglish_versionentry.
NOTE 2: Some of the spaces are displaying a bit odd in the code snippet. Check the spaces are as they should be if you use this.

I automated the links between the old entries by making guesses based on date of publication and this SQL. If you are in this situation:

Use this sql to extract the blog ids
SELECT date( a.entry_created_on ) , a.entry_id, a.entry_title, b.entry_id, b.entry_title
FROM mt_entry a, mt_entry b
WHERE date( a.entry_created_on ) = date( b.entry_created_on )
AND a.entry_blog_id != b.entry_blog_id
AND a.entry_blog_id =1
AND a.entry_status =2
AND b.entry_status =2
ORDER BY a.entry_created_on

Remove entries where there’s more than one on a date and deal with those separately (keep a list). Create one list for insert for English and one list for insert for French. Insert direct into database in mt_entry_meta table.

set the first id (the english entry id) as entry_meta_entry_id, the french entry id should have heading entry_meta_vchar_idx
add a heading entry_meta_type and put: “field.french_entry” on each line.

When this is tidy, copy the data below the existing data. Swap the ids with each other, and put field.english_entry in the entry_meta_type column.

Then delete the date and title fields and import into the database.

Bells and whistles

The look of the site was nothing to do with me. Andy at origin8 creative did all that and was a pleasure to work with in the implementation phase. The front end coding of the HTML and CSS was also nothing to do with me, with Sarah making that work well for all platforms and thinking about print stylesheets and the suchlike.

The fancy font work is sIFR, which works nicely when it does, but drove us all a bit crazy in terms of documentation and versions of sIFR and so on.

The links page works by doing multiple javascript calls to delicious – one for each of the tags pulled in. This allows Céline to save her bookmarks to delicious and have them automatically included on her site as she wants them to appear. I’m not happy with this approach, especially as it has a tendancy to clash a bit with the navigation javascript requirements of sIFR, but it works and I’ll keep looking for a better solution.

That’s that

In all, I’m pretty pleased with the end result and will be tidying up the loose ends over the next few days.

I am encouraged that “ways to say I love you” comes above “ways to kill yourself”. On the other hand, you’d sort of hope that people could work out how to say I love you without having to resort to Google. Whereas killing yourself maybe does require some research. And what does it say about MySpace that so many people need to search Google to find out how to add themselves to it? Even more people than need to search Google to find out how to be annoying, in fact.

Now, what was I trying to find?

Yesterday, this happened when I came across the G24 on the Guardian website.

G24 brings you the latest stories from the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and the Observer – updated throughout the day. There are five pdfs to choose from: Top stories, World, Media, Business and Sport.

The PDFs are free, but well designed, and remind me a little of newsletters in their format. I would love to know how they make these work behind the scenes, but it appears there’s enough of a template to just drop stuff in and be done with it. There’s no attempt to use all the space – a story might run onto a page and then be followed by lots of white space. It’s possible that it’s all done automatically, but it looks a little too slick for that. Regardless, an incredibly clever way to re purpose content and reach the commuter (or lunch) market.

Site purpose: To allow customers to research and buy tickets, including top-up, for the Oyster card used on London Transport.

Overview: This site has serious usability problems that hinder the customer’s experience. The following points should be addressed. Further issues exist, but these points would dramatically improve the site in the short term. I recommend a thorough usability review is carried out.

# Fares information

Provide single page including travelcard prices, Oyster single fare prices, Oyster capping and cash fares.

Provide same information for price changes in 2007, for easy comparison.

Provide explanation for withdrawal of single zone travelcards.

# Oyster accounts

Once logged in to the Oyster account, allow a way for user to email for help.

When searching help, provide email help link before search, as well as after.

When emailing help, don’t try to create new account using existing account name.

When emailing help, indicate how a response might be received, if at all. e.g. to email address, to account? etc.

When providing top up / travelcard payment system, show prices of travelcards and tickets through the process (currently not shown at all).

When providing top up / travelcard payment system, only show available tickets, rather than providing error message once desired ticket is selected but not available (e.g. single zone travelcards).

When providing top up / travelcard payment system, show status throughout ordering to clarify whether pressing ‘continue’ will activate the ticket and take payment, or just take you to another information screen.

[Report recommendations emailed to TFL on 15th December, 2006, after frustrating experiences with all of the above and the discovery that I will be £200 a year worse off due to the inexplicable withdrawal of Zone 1 travelcards.]

To my amusement she wrote the whole thing on my very old Toshiba laptop that took me through university in the mid 90′s and runs Windows 3.1, has a little black and white screen and contains my CompuServe email from back in the day. The battery’s dead, obviously, but it works and there’s no chance she’d get distracted doing anything else on it!

So, how did my sister get into the less than 20% of people who complete NaNoWriMo? My observation would be that the key thing was, basically, committment. She put her social life on hold, set herself a reasonable daily word count, and went home and wrote. She had bad times with nothing to write, but she wrote, and days when she didn’t want to be in the office but instead home writing, but she went to work and wrote in the evening. She was also spurred on by some frankly brilliant emails from Chris, who runs NaNoWriMo, full of motivation, little tips and support. She wanted to do it, decided she’d do it, and did it.

I think it’s not unrelated that a few months ago Octavia decided to run the Nike 10K in London. She had never run before and started a training regime, sticking to it, and resulting in a very impressive run. Basically, she took on a challenge, and succeeded, which makes other challenges that bit more achievable. Probably no less hard in themselves, but it’s easier to believe you can do it if you’ve just done something else that seemed hard to begin.

And what’s the novel about? Not a clue… and I’m not sure it really matters. In talking to her I’ve gathered there are three main characters, one of whom is named after her cat, but the greater emphasis has been on the writing process. At one point she got bored with a character, so she just started writing about another one. Then she decided she’d move from first person to third person for a bit. She played with it and fought with it, and it worked.

I’m allowed my very own copy of the novel if I donate some money to NaNoWriMo. From their site:

Our estimated costs for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program in 2006 total $183,400. This is our break-even point. Half of all money raised beyond above that will go to our Libraries in Southeast Asia program, and the other half will serve as much-needed start-up funds for the 2007 event.

Sounds good to me.

I first watched the introductory film that shows David Cameron in his house about to do the washing up while his children scream out of shot. It also features his family’s underwear in the background and he wields a bottle of a green brand washing up liquid. Of course, everyone knows that a lot of work goes into making that stuff look quite so real, and I’m sure there was a lot of attention paid to what did and didn’t appear in shot. I would love to see the versions that didn’t make it, or know exactly how hard they tried to get it all to hang together, and exactly how did the conversation go when they decided that underwear was a good idea. I think the washing up liquid is sort of genius, drawing on product placement techniques to subtly drive home the message about how ‘green’ Cameron is.
The other thing that strikes me is that there’s a limit to how many times Cameron will be able to say that the Government is running scared and Tony Blair has screwed up. He is trying to come across as a nice guy, but every now and then he makes a swipe at the Government that doesn’t really parse very well. I guess that the problem is that he has to address the general public and die hard members of the Conservative party all at once, and make political points while generating a public image of what a great guy he is, which is a hard balance to strike.

Anyway, the site is far more interesting than I had expected, but I’m not sure I’ll be a regular visitor.

Chocolate and Vodka :: Post Comment

I read Suw’s blog fairly regularly and think she is one of life’s Good Things, for what it’s worth. She is having a problem learning a new programming language and I thought I could help. I clicked the comments button, and typed my comment (about accessing MySQL at the command line, and it seems to have been resolved as I’ve been typing up this entry).

Then I saw that she asks users to verify they are real by typing in the captcha code. No probs, I thought, I can just about make out those letters. And then I scrolled a little further and saw that I needed to add a username and password and I’m told that the blog doesn’t allow anonymous comments. I’m happy to tell her who I am, but, um, there’s nothing on the comment form about how to get a login or just give her info about me for one little comment. So, I stared at the screen for a while and read the comment form a couple more times in case I’d missed something. Then I thought about how my comment might not be that welcome, and lacks insight, and probably won’t solve her problem, although it might be helpful, um….

Then I noticed ‘Create Reader Account’ further up the page and clicked on that. And then I clicked a link on that page to actually, you know, get to the page to create a reader account. And by this point I was really wondering how much I cared about commenting, which meant that when it asked me for too much information (I’m not even sure what, to be honest) I pressed the back button and decided the barrier to commenting was too high.

Keen as I am to give low level, unrequested technical help that might not be appropriate, I then glanced around for a way to email direct, but could see no contact info. At that point I had invested enough in the process to choose to whinge about it here, where I already have a login, and, with the combined forces of Askimet and WordPress, Suw can come and tell me I’m a fool on my blog without any nasty barriers to entry (apart from my slightly dubious site design, my one-time approval queue, and her lack of inclination of course…).

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/home.do

Why, oh why?