Comment blank

I don't leave a whole lot of comments on other people's blogs, but I've noticed that I regularly forget where and on whose blog I left a comment. Right now I'm wondering on whose blog I left a comment yesterday. In fact, I can't quite remember what I commented on. Does that happen to you as well?

Jul 23, 2004 @ 09:48 » 1 comment » Blogosphere

Back

Well, if you noticed that previous post you might have deducted that we're back from our holiday. Not that I had announced that we were leaving... there was suddenly so much to do the couple of days before we left, I never got around to writing a short entry saying I'd be gone for month. What little time I spent on the computer was spend trying to install a plugin that would close all old entries for comments in an attempt to prevent too much spam from getting through while I wasn't watching. The plugin wouldn't work and I ended up yanking the comment script from the site just before we left. Oh well...

We travelled around Japan for 4 weeks and had a fantastic holiday. We covered quite a bit of ground by hire car and train, going from Tokyo to Nikko, to Matsumoto, to Takayama, to Ainokura, to Kanazawa, to Kyoto, to Mt. Koya, back to Kyoto, to Himeji, to Yonago, to Hiroshima, to Yufuin, to Fukuoka, and back home. There was so much we saw, tasted, and experienced that I'm not even going to try to describe it in one blogpost. Rather, I'll try to post some observations as and when I happen to think about them in the next couple of weeks. At least there are a couple of reasons why it's good to be back home: I'm not bumping my head into doorposts, ceilings and lamps 27 times a day anymore; decent toilet paper and not that 'see through thin, it'll rip any which way but the way it's supposed to rip' stuff that seems universal in Japan; and most importantly, good coffee!

Jul 23, 2004 @ 10:07 » 1 comment » General

Changes and language switching

I haven't been all that happy with this site for quite a while... for several reasons. One is that for an extended period of time I've felt like I'd run out of steam and consequently I felt like I didn't have all that much to write about. Another is that I've been feeling that the technology driving the site is often in the way of writing. It's not just the content management system (CMS) that's been giving me the jitters, nor just the layout which I think needs a thorough overhaul, but mostly a lack of integration.

There are several sections on this site, the main blog that you are reading now, my Dutch blog, the Cyberculture Resources, and the not yet very integrated Fotolog and Quicklinks. Because of the way MovableType operates, these different sections are each their own weblog installation and are thus separated from eachother not just in presentation on this website but also in management/administration in the CMS. This most importantly means that they are separate from each other conceptually. While I don't feel that it is a big problem for the Cyberculture Resources or the Quicklinks to be somewhat separate from the rest of the weblog, it is a big show stopper for the "content rich" posts in the English, Dutch, and Photo sections.

You could say that I am bilingual (or trilingual if you'd count photography as a third language) and virtually every weblog application is monolingual. There is no true support for more than one language in any of the weblog applications that I've looked at. What we need is not just internationalization and localization of applications, as important as they are, but we need true support for multi-linguality. We need a "language switch."

I think Stephanie wrote up the problem quite well and even provided a great solution for Wordpress users. As she also notes, you can't adequately solve this problem by using the category system provided by most weblog applications. When I want to write a review, I want to file it under Reviews and I don't want to file under either English/Review or Nederlands/Recensie. Say you are bilingual, just like me, and you want to see all my reviews, whether they are in English or Dutch, you should be able to pull them up by hitting the "review/recensie" category. If you read only English or only Dutch, you'd hit the language switch and immediately filter out only the English or the Dutch reviews. Pretty much the same should go for the whole weblog.

Actually, taking a little detour here, this points to another problem. Users are free to choose how they name their categories and these categories generally play an important role in the navigation of the website. However, categories can not be "localized" depending on where you are in the website. A "review" is a "recensie" in Dutch but I can only choose one of those two words to indicate a single category. However, regardless of which language I choose to write in, I want my review to go in the "review/recensie" category. Ideally the language switch would be smart enough to allow localization of categories, showing you the category name in the proper language, depending on which language you chose through the language switch.

When I write, I don't want to be thinking about how or where my post fits into the weblog and I don't want to realize after the first paragraph that I need to copy/paste my text into a different weblog installation. I want to write my post as an integral part of my bi/multi-lingual weblog, set the language switch, and publish it. The software should be smart enough to deal with my post in the right way. Ideally each post would be published to the "front page," while allowing separate indexes for each language, including a separate index for the photographs, in case you just want to browse through the photographs. Not quite incidentally, most weblog applications could do with a serious upgrade of their photo/file handling and integration (but that's a topic for another post: photo uploading, thumbnailing, post integration, and dynamic image handling for liquid designs).

So, where does that leave me for the moment? I've installed Wordpress to test it out and I'd already decided to give MovableType 3 a spin around the block and I will install that later. Just this morning Six Apart released new details about the upcoming MT version 3.1 (general non-developers release). The most intriguing news is that MT will start to offer dynamic PHP generated content on a per template basis, meaning that the previously fundamentally "static" MT will now allow you to set up a dynamic weblog and generate static files for only a couple of high traffic indexes, such as for instance RSS/Atom feeds and the main index.

Interestingly enough, this exact same morning Matt delivers news of the updated Staticize plugin that will allow the fundamentally dynamic Wordpress to deliver certain high-traffic indexes, such as RSS/Atom feeds, as static files, resulting in less work for the webserver. Guess this is an indication of things to come: an optimal distribution between dynamic and static content, meaning both flexibility for the user and low server overhead. Meanwhile I will try to pick up posting here a bit and not be such a slouch.

Jul 27, 2004 @ 13:15 » 4 comments » Sitestuff

Picture

I was going to post a picture I took in Japan here, but suddenly MovableType borks creating a thumbnail big time. So if you want to have a look at a pretty picture of wet leaves in Kanazawa, you can temporarily follow this link. If you happen to have a clue what kind of tree this is, feel free to leave a comment :)

All in all it seems about the right time to ditch MovableType, or at least this installation of MovableType, because through no action on my part the search function started acting funny and now I can't upload images anymore. Hrmp!

Jul 27, 2004 @ 22:33 » no comments » Sitestuff

A small miracle

I had dreaded the day I would have to open my mailbox at work. Including our holiday it would have been close to six week since I had last checked it. I figured it would be filled to the brim with spam. So when I finally forced myself to open Outlook at work last Wednesday I was pretty surprised to only see 407 unread messages. I checked how many messages had been filtered into the spam-folder. Just 34. And scrolling through the subjects of the unread messages revealed that only three actual spams had made it into my inbox. A small miracle. The university sysadmins must have tightened the spam filters when I wasn't there. Great!

Of course, I could have done without the 60 or so automated messages from the sysadmins telling me that both my Outlook mailbox and my homedir are over their quota. Sending those messages daily won't help cure the problem, especially not when the user of that account is on holiday. They should rather talk to the department staff who insist on sending us their newsletters as huge Word attachments bloated from included images and loads of styling. I recon that would reduce intranet traffic and storage needs significantly. Oh well... I just need to process some 300 messages now, so that's pretty doable.

Jul 31, 2004 @ 13:19 » no comments » Work



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