Localised blogs: Some examples from the real world

As I mentioned in the previous post, whatever the i18n degree that blogging software or services may have reached, users almost always have the option to create their own localised blog in a given language.

I have found several Welsh examples, that resume probably the typology of l10n results that particular bloggers may achieve when localizing their blogs. It is a 3-level typology.

1. No interface localization. The blogging machine seems to be of the EnglishBlog type, or, perhaps, the user doesn't have the expertise to hack for l10n. Examples: "buchods.blog-city.com/:"http://buchods.blog-city.com/ & BratiaithBlog . Bloggers in both sites post in Welsh, and all interface messages are in English.
2. Partial interface localization. The blogging machine seems to have some degree of i18n, or, perhaps, personalization of the blog permits the user to touch strings and things like tkat. Unardegg looks very much Welsh, but date formats appear in English, with mixed messages like Postiwyd gan Mr Coch yn Tuesday, April 20 @ 13:05:44 GMT. I assume that the blogger couldn't reach that level of date-format l10n... If the blogger knew or could have done it, I suspect that the dates would be also in proper Welsh.
3. Consistent localization. Morfablog looks Welsh, and dates are also in Welsh. Qgil's blog in Catalonia looks also consistently localised

Those blogs are made with a variety of tools.

The first two, the imperfect ones (that's an unfair way to say it, I know....) are hosted in blogging account web services. They seem to offer limited l10n options to their users...

The 2nd case (Unardegg), with partial interface localization, is a blog made with PHP-Nuke. This software has an active i18n and l10n activity but it seems that many Nuke sites have the same date-formatting problem as Unardegg. This example, "nukeunited.com" is a Nuke site with English content but in which you can change the interface language. The resulst are very poor. Enviado por NukeUnited el Thursday, 08 August a las 11:29:49 doesn't look like a very correct Spanish sentence... However, some Nuke users are well aware of that, and have devised partial solutions: this patch for date formatting in Turkish shows that correct dates may be displayed in Turkish, at least... There's hope for Welsh Nuke-sites, after all.

The consistent cases use Movable Type in the case of Morfablog, and Drupal in the case of QGil's blog.

• Movable Type has an active l10n section at their website.
• Drupal is in development stage, but it seems that there are good options for bloggers or hackers to develop localized versions, as Qgil shows. There is also discussion going on on the site. In this other post that catalan user of Drupal, Qgil, offers his approach to the variety of multilingualism we may find in the web.

Just to mention CoreBLOG, the software running behind The English Cementery.

• CoreBLOG. No i18n attempts so far. Well, the software hasn't reached 1.0. However, this is Zope and l10n can be done, hacking a little bit as I am doing. I also hope to release a l10n skin soon. We'll see.

Besides these localised blogs, then there is the curious world of bilingual or multilingual blogs... A much more limited necessity, probably, but well, there are some of us with that strange obsession. That's a matter for another post.