The English Cemetery

The most popular Bloglines blogs in Basque, Sustatu and Sarean have 28 and 27 subscribers each. I find it amazing that they're in a 1-100 proportion to the most popular in English. Basque is just the language of 0.6 m people, and the number or Basque bloggers is still minimal.

There was a blog out there Analysing Bloglines Subscriber Stats.

Some of the most popular ones, with the most subscribers, Dave Winer: 2652 Mark Pilgrim: 2100 Lawrence Lessig: 2794 Jon Udell: 1619

There's this Mailman-based service of ours called Postaria.com which serves mailing-lists and e-newsletters in Spanish and Basque. We have convinced three veteran basque lists to transfer their lists from Yahoo Groups to the new service. The problem was the big archives left behind: six years, 30,000 messages and over 60 Mb of content, conversations, data, left at the almost unreachable and unsearchable Yahoo Groups archives.

But, well, little by little, we recovered those messages. It's nice to have one's content under control. Bye bye Yahoo. Welcome Mailman and Gmane.

As Gmane offers uploading of old .mbox'es as well as continued archiving of current lists, it was a perfect choice. Parallel archiving with Mailman and Gmane, and searchable all-time archives at Gmane...

• Basque lists at Gmane

Moreover, now each list-owner has its old .mbox under control, and with Mailman/Postaria they are not locked, the new .mbox currently updated daily is accesible so they can migrate again or analyze the content whenever they want.

The 3 basque lists saved by free software:

• Eibartarrak (a local group)
• Dantzan (Basque dances)
• ItzuL (professional resource for basque translators)

What happened to these lists with Yahoo worries me regarding other big-storage web services like GMail. They let you store things THERE but, at the end, it is HERE, at your hands (at the hands of the legitimate owner), where you need it.

Slight update in the CSS/localised version of Coreblog. Now blog entries show the date in a complete format, as in Spanish Miércoles, 23 de Junio de 2004. The same in English or Basque. It's a more proper way to show a date in a localised product, I think. The method lets also full control over the date-string to adapt it to any locale. For instance, in Basque several declension factors depend on the year and element-order is also different: 2004ko ekainaren 23a, asteazkena. Next year, in Basque, the declension to be added to 2005 will not be -ko but -eko, so 2005eko ekainaren..., and next year, in turn... Well, particularities can be odd in every language, but the method can be adapted to whatever you need.

Moreover, a long date string adapts better to the pure CSS design that Jeff Hicks created and we adapted for this localised version.

Links to demos and downloadable files in a previous post

I've produced a new localised version of Coreblog, importable as a .zexp and installable as a skin. It's based in Localizer, a nice Zope product

I am afraid that this doesn't solve the problems that a Chinese user reported... but, at least, with latin alphabet based western european languages, it runs nicely.

The novelties of this version are:

• tested with Coreblog 0.72b
• the design has been merged with the CSS version produced by Jeff Hicks

Totally localised Spanish and Basque .zexp's available here.

and the demos to see the output:

• Basque demo
• Spanish demo

also a demo of a trilingual interface:

• Trilingual demo

There are also instructions to produce versions in other languages.

This new version of Coreblog is been already used successfully at this site. Eibar.org is a local Basque asso. of Internet users, and we've just re-arranged our site both as

• a coreblog by itself
• a community of Basque blogs, all of them Coreblogs in turn, localised in Basque and with easily changeable CSS skins.

In addition to Coreblog, there are also a couple of simple page-editing tools so bloggers can have some static-looking pages as in this example

Sharing translation resources, tm tools... interesting topics. A search at Bloglines.com led me to this blog, written by Tim Foster at Sun. Now he's subscribed at my account at Bloglines (although the code of the RSS feed looks odd at Bloglines, there must be some error). I suppose the Tumatxa project (sharing translation memories on the web) could be of interest for this guy. But obviously, at our a small Basque company we may be working on the same field, but we're certainly on a very different scale.

A friend posts in a list that he would like Googlebot not to click on the trackback URL's offered by his blog. I think that TB Url's are not to be clicked, neither by humans nor by robots. They're just to be copied by bloggers to paste them into their own posts. In this Coreblog of mine I touched the templates to let the TBping URL appear in a "text input" field. I feel like it's easier to copy a line of text when it's in an input field like that.

Gmane. A great resource. They arhive mailing lists, and offer that content as searchable web pages or Usenet newsgroups. It's creator Lars is weighing the possibility to offer also RSS feeds, but he doesn't seem much convinced... After seeing the way another list archiving system, Mailbucket, uses to provide feeds (example feed for list ASRG ), Lars from Gmane says:

> Hm. I had imagined presenting excerpts or something, but these are > full mails. Does anybody really read mail in this manner? It seems > really... odd. >

My own opinion, was posted at Gmane.discuss and here it goes:

Yahoo provides the first 100 characters (quoted text left aside) of Yahoo Group messages in its almost hidden rss feed. Check this example for instance.

Mail-archive.com offers no content in its feed, just the title line as this example for coreblog-en. That is a Mailman list that actually is being archived also at Gmane

I feel the YG feed is better than Mailbucket's and that Mailbucket's is better than Mail-archive.com's

However, the feeds provided by Google Groups 2 Beta are the best.

Each GoogleGroups 2 Beta has two feeds, one message per message, the other for threads. I would love Gmane to provide such a double feed. As a matter of fact, our basque Mailman mailing list being channeled to Gmane ( here ) and it is also being stored at Google Groups 2 Beta, just to provide another channel for potential readers:

• msg per msg feed
• thread feed

This way, thanks to Mailman, Gmane and Google Groups 2 Beta we offer potential users all channels available from our archive page

And yes, there's people reading mailing lists through feed-readers...

The big affair with Movable Type, its new licenses and pricing structure, has ignited a debate in Internet. Many are weighting alternatives to MT to migrate their blogs to a free open environment... I think it could be a good moment to publicize Coreblog.

Here there are a couple of table comparisons for people willing to leave MT: one , two

Coreblog doesn't appear at those comparisons. Well, I leave this point here for comment... Maybe Atsushi at Webcore will take note.

If Coreblog had more users, we'd have a stronger community, and a stronger product as well.

Is it possible, bilingual blogging?

Yes, and there are sites out there. But, the truly coherent, consistent, bilingual blog... I just haven't found it. My blog isn't either that kind of blog. I have written a list of features (Ten Commandments) with which true multilingual blogs should comply.

My own blog is, surprise! quite compliant. Well, this list reflects personal viewpoints, so no one should feel disappointed with this superiority of standards shown by The English Cemetery: it's a biased commandment list. However, I miserably fail with commandments 6 and 7, so far. Regarding 4, my blog could behave better also (and it can, using the power of Zope and Localizer, but I'm just too lazy right now).

So, the good, true and faithful bilingual blog should have:

1. Language change. There should be a button, link, or pulldown menu to click or select, present in every page. That's the way to turn from reading content in one language to the other in a bilingual blog. Mixtures of languages in individual pages, no, that's not OK. Langauge change behaviour could vary: the distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical blogs that I describe here is a key issue.
2. Monolingual entry page. The main page appears to you in a given language, coherently English, or coherently Basque. Then, you may opt to change language. The first page to appear may be set by default, or perhaps, depend on browser settings. This commandement rules out the usual mixture of Lang1 / Lang2 messages in the first page, ordered by pure chronology, as well as the very curious double-horizontal layout of several sites.
3. Interface as well as content bilingualism. You are reading a Basque post, so you can click on the Erantzunak link, if you know what it means. You are reading an English post, so you can click on the Comments link. Interface bilingualism should be bilingualism, not double-strings. No "Erantzunak / Comments" links. I don't like the redundancy at this en-fr or en-de sites. Messages should be in one or other language, depending on the content or language-category of the post you are reading, or in the action taken by the users when clicking the language change option.
4. Interface string localisation capabilities. Not just single terms, by locale sensitive logic issues like date formats (and dates are important when blogging) should be localised in each language. In XML feeds, date formats should be standard.
5. No double reading work. These people, for instance, they translate every post, so they explain things twice, once in A, another one in B. ( Transblawg , 0909 ) Such a blog could work with symmetrical model described in a previous post . One may fell the need to say the same things in several languages, of course, but, the reader? I can only understand that as an attempt of 2nd language or translation-teaching for your readers. Separate messages makes discussion or commenting consistent as well. Basque readers respond to Basque messages, Spanish readers to Spanish ones. Different threads may be constructed, of course. A bilingual messages can't have a consistent thread behind it: are we supposed to comment also in bilingual ?
6. Open and coherent categorization. So far, my own blog is trilingual cause I have twisted Coreblog to make just 3 categories as locale-defining factors. The result is that I don't have categories, just language options. Other blogs also use categorization for multilingualism.
7. Character sets conveniently adapted to non-ascii character sets. At the HTML interface level, as well as in XML feeds or pings (trackbacks) delivered.
8. One separate XML feed per language. This is the most obvious feature to me. Look at the commandments listed here: the mixing of languages in postings, categories, interfaces and so on can be so complicated. The XML feed must always be clear. Those who use the feed with some aggregator or other need clear messages from our feed. Basque users need a clear XML feed in Basque from this site. Basque users who understand other languages and want the other content that I post here, then it's easy: they can subscribe to the other language feeds as well. The XML feed should include, if possible the lang variable marked following the Dublin Core standard or in any other feed specification that there might be.
9. Same system (that is, ONE system) for the bilingual blog. If it's a moblog, the email posting procedure must be the same for the whole blog, with just one variable (a kewyord in the message or something) to direct the email to the Basque or English section of the blog. If you change the skin, the css-style, whatever, you change it once, it is applied conveniently to the whole blog, to its contents.
10. Should be based in free software and its content protected by an open license, like creative commons or FDL. I needed the 10th commandement to reach the magic number, so I included this one :-)

Examples out there.

• Blogalization is funny, several languages are categories, but there other supra-language categories, all in English, for English posts. English is supra-categorical... and interface messages are only in English. Not, clearly, what I ask in point #6.
• Miss-Information.net has clear separated categories (good, as for #6), some are for french posts, the other for English posts. But the main index page is a chronological mixture, not a coherent page that I ask in point #2. Moreover, the interface messages are "double", not bilingual as I ask in point #4.
• Joi Ito, and his double blog, in English and Japanese . Good try. However, no interface bilingualism (#4). The japanese side, has the same Movable Type message collection in English. Moreover, I am not truly convinced if it is really what I ask in #9, just one machinery or two are there working in this site?
• Some posts in one language, others in other. Just chronological ordering and mixing, and also a mix, or monolingualism in interface messages. There are several of this kind. They seem interesting, btw. This one is Farsi and English and this one Chinese and English
• Separate feeds. These two sites have separate feeds, Polish/English and Dutch/German":http://www.interdependent.biz/main/index2.html But they look awkward with their double home-page: Horizontal scrolling cannot be the solution for bilingual blogging.

I have advanced in my i18n / l10n attempts with Coreblog. I have released my localised skin as a series of zexp files. This attempt needs Localizer, first of all, http://www.localizer.org If you have Localizer installed, then you can proceed.

I have released my localised skin as a series of zexp files. Importing that folder... then, you change the skin and there it is. I have also released some notes so others can localize it in other languages. As a matter of fact, it's not more work than translating some 60 or so strings in a .po file. Look here to check .po files: http://www.tumatxa.com/intl/ZTMX/coreblog

Instalation how-to's an the zexp files, here: http://www.manterola.org/familia/luistxo/coreblog/en

A localised Coreblog looks like

http://www.manterola.org/familia/luistxo/coreblog/esblog in Spanish, or http://www.manterola.org/familia/luistxo/coreblog/triblog with language change in the interface

Of course, this is nothing more than a personal attempt. I hope Atsushi and the people at Webcore will face one day the i18n of the original product. Without that, sustainability of l10n efforts is difficult. I must also say that I am no techie at all. I just have some user experience with Zope, and also have some ideas about i18n and l10n.

At least I tried to follow the clear and standard way that Localizer provides for l10n: a string repository following the Gettext methodology, logic locale-issues stored in particular folders...

A disclaimer: I tried to provide the original default style_css styles sheet with these skins of mine, but the graphic output didn't look the same as in the original (I don't know why). So, the skins come with a slightly modified skin, partly copied (fonts and other things) from Tom Lazar's coreblog at <http://www.tomster.org/blog>Tomster.org