i summon one kim

David Sasaki (oso) wrote to the wp-polyglots mailing list with some questions for an article he is working on about “multilingual, multicultural, and transnational blogs.” I answered him and I also wanted to post here about blogging in two languages.

As you may have seen my blog now respects the language settings of your browser. You will not see posts in languages that you have not enabled in your browser (unless your settings would rule out all posts). If you want to see all posts, just make sure your browser is configured to requests both English and Finnish content. To exclude a language, check that your browser settings include all the languages you do want to see.

As an example, if your browser is configured to only prefer content in German (de), you would currently see all posts (since I don’t have any in German). If you’d rather not see the Finnish content, you can add English (en) to the list of preferred languages. This would result in the Finnish ones to be excluded (just force a reload of the page).

Read on for the questions and answers… (more…)

I’ve released DoFollow 2.0 to go with WordPress 1.5.1. The functionality is the same as before, and the plugin can be used with (an unpatched) 1.5 as well.

The patch I had proposed to core WordPress functionality is gone: the developers prefer to keep the current nofollow implementation as is. If you had previously applied the patch, you can download a copy from Mosquito issue #1087 and reverse it (e.g. using patch -p -R).

I wanted to make this change to DoFollow, as it removes a chunk of code that was digging in some internal structures of WordPress that don’t have an exposed and documented API. Now it is much less likely that changes to DoFollow would be required for maintaining compatibility with future WordPress releases.

Uusi WordPress 1.5.1 on ilmestynyt, ja nyt myös suomenkielinen versio on valmis. Sen voi noutaa osoitteesta

http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/wordpress-fi/

Uusista ominaisuuksista voi lukea Dev Blogin ilmoituksesta. Uusi versio sisältää tietoturvaa parantavan korjauksen, joten päivittäminen on suositeltavaa.

Erityisesti haluan kiittää Minnaa käännöksen tason kohottamisesta.

Minna lähetti koko joukon parannuksia ja korjauksia sekä pari kyseenalaistusta WordPressin käännösteksteihin. Minnan tehokkuuden innoittamana käärin kasaan testiversion numero 347. Sen voi ladata suomenkielisen WordPressin kotisivulta:

http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/wordpress-fi/

Kuten aina koeversioiden kanssa: käyttö omalla vastuulla! Jos koko blogisi hajoaa tai artikkelit katoavat taivaan tuuliin, paras tapa toipua on palauttaa tietokanta ja tiedostot varmuuskopioilta. (jatkuu…)

Frequent visitors (if there are any) have noticed that the colors on the site have kept changing. The rest of you must have just been wondering why the SSH Tutorial is in a different color each day.

I was really taken by the visual impact of the Borderline Chaos template submitted to the WordPress 1.5 Themes competition. It has nice strong colors, and its layout was begging to be implemented with CSS only. I didn’t want to use a background image, which means the sidebar background does not reach to the bottom of the page, but I don’t think it has to. I wanted better contrast in the sidebar boxes, which led to rather bright backgrounds that caused me to abandon the colors (especially after some feedback from my friends). I also wanted to have the main content (the articles) appear first in the output, and while that doesn’t require the sidebar to be on the right, I just like it better that way.

I think the current colors are here to stay for a while now. I should look up whose flag is white, blue and green.

There are (at least) a couple of things I didn’t do carefully enough in the past when it came to maintaining this website: I didn’t always preserve old URL’s (I try hard now), and when the basis for the current look was established, many documents were pushed aside to an “old” folder for later evaluation. Of course, “later” tends to become “never.”

I was looking at the referrers again (warning, slow link^*) and I’m always curious when there is a link to the front page of the site. This one was from Rob Jenson’s site, on a page about system administration. There was not only one link but two, one of them broken!

I dug up the old anonymous document called Computer Administration Vocabulary for Computer Users, polished it up to XHTML and gave it a new home on my site. I still find it quite funny, but I remember putting it aside before, thinking that someone might actually think it reflects my real attitude towards my work. Stranger things have happened…

* Viewing the referrers page causes a number of database updates (relatively fast) and DNS lookups (sometimes extremely slow), which is why the page may take anywhere between 2 and 25 seconds to load.