i summon one kim

David Sasaki (oso) wrote on 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…)

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 link¹) 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…

I like to look around in the recent referrers of my website. Today I saw a referral from GeoURL, to my surprise. I had already given up ever seeing anything but “we’ve gone away” on the front page, with the “near” lookups just returning an error.

Well, they are back! I need to work that little box back into my layout now. For the time being: have a look at the sites near me, courtesy of GeoURL.

Given that I’ve successfully avoided spam by using me at example dot com as an “obfuscation” method for email addresses, I’m not surprised by the findings that spammers are lazy. But it is still interesting to read about good proof through a real test, and I’d hazard a guess that using hex entities may be a longer-lasting method.

I’d consider replacing the JavaScript I currently use, if it weren’t for the fact that people already seem to be able to find my email address just fine. Actually, Phil’s article would seem to support the case that disabling JavaScript is rare. He only got a couple of actual messages to the non-JavaScript address. I guess that’s good news for me.

Ei ole ollenkaan uusi ajatus, että tuleva työnantaja kirjoittaa työnhakijan nimen Googleen ja muodostaa sitä kautta palkkaamispäätökseen vaikuttavia mielipiteitä. Kuitenkin useimmilla ihmisillä on selvä raja yksityisen elämän ja työelämän välillä. Yksityiselämän asiat eivät kuulu työpaikalle, ja työelämän asioitakin tavallisesti pyritään pitämään poissa kotielämästä. Internetissä tämä raja helposti hämärtyy — on liian helppoa nähdä kumpikin elämä samalla kertaa hakukoneiden avulla. (jatkuu…)

I wanted to see if I could have my WordPress links in the Firefox Bookmarks menu. I thought this should be possible, since it knows about RSS. From using reBlog I had learned about FeedCreator, which is a great package for quickly creating feeds. So I enhanced wp-links to support feeds.

However, I was to be disappointed — the links are in Firefox now, but they are all piled up together in a single huge menu. In the WordPress database the links are categorized, as can be seen on my links page. I was hoping Firefox would use the categories to create more subfolders.

I thought about another approach: XBEL. The format is simple enough to follow, so I added XBEL support to FeedCreator 1.7.2. This works perfectly with the Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin for Firefox. I’ve configured it to download a single subdirectory inside Bookmarks, and all my WordPress link categories show up as subdirectories inside it.

I’ve made some sample code available to show how I’m calling wp-links. The code won’t run as-is, as it calls some other libraries I’m using. It should be simple enough, though, to remove (or ignore) the “extra” stuff.

I have new versions of Firefox running on my computers, and I was busy adding block images rules on each one. I thought this was less than ideal, so I decided to give Privoxy a new try. I saw that a new version is out, so I updated the www/privoxy package as well. Apart from getting more up-to-date filters, there’s a memory leak fix and I could also enable threads for parallel request handling.