The English Cemetery

Seems Lars the Gmane-master has sone interest in this crazy idea of mine. There it goes:

The Blog Interface for Gmane would show lists and msgs as if they were blogs, entries and comments. How?

Like this:

http://www.eibar.org/blogak/luistxo/images/BIG1.html

CAUTION: that is a fake plane html dummy page. All links are false... However, the messages shown are true, a selection of some days at July at gmane.discuss

At a first glance, we see 3 messages there. They are thread initials, only. The ones that in Classic Gmane appear indented with black little strokes are classified as comments and hidden below each main entry... That would be what we would see at blog.gmane.org/gmane.discuss

Well, this is just fake, but instead of whole messages in each entry I suppose that some 500 or 800 chars. could be automatically classed as summary and the rest is reachable after clicking in a Continue reading link. More or less, a selection similar to the one that the RSS method provides.

A plus would be, of course, some kind of javascript trick a-la-Gmail to let quoted parts expand or hide according to a click.

Now, look at the right column. The Current view caption tells us that it is a threaded view... Well, besides blog.gmane.org/gmane.discuss there could be an additional interface with all-messages, plainly arranged chronologically, some url like chronoblog.gmane.org/gmane.discuss and with no comments in the entries.

Another click would change the the view from only 800 chars to whole msg and viceversa.

And now, the other view, that of a given message or thread: http://www.eibar.org/blogak/luistxo/images/BIG2.html

this could be the equivalent to thread.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/6153 which would be URL'ed like entry.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/6153

In this default view, each reply would be chronlogically displayed, with no thread-indication. But a click would display a threaded view of the replies, like collective massive blogs like Kuro5hin or Slashdot do. We could call that threadentry.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/6153*

That could be trickier to adapt to a clean CSS html, but well...

The reply option, in this blog interfaces, would be a open dialog box below the entries. That would answer to the initial main msg. For other messages in the thread, another window would be opened after clicking on Reply to this comment

Each comment-permalink, if it leads to a sub-thread, would display its own replies as comments, with the sub-thread initial as the main msg. In those partial threads or sub-thread there would be that button, now below at Classic Gmane to find the original thread.

And well, the column at the right shows the options of Gmane, as well as the typical blog options: the calendar, the msgs archived by month (a much more usable feature than the pull-down numeral menu of old messages of Classic Gmane). Google ads should go there also.

This example of dummy html pages follows a Movable-Type-like Html layout and just altering the CSS the view of the interface would change completely. A community of blogs hosted there offers variants as Espaloia , Iturri or Prospektiba all sharing the same html layout. Some samples to share at Movablestyle

Why?

What's the purpose of all this crazy idea, the Blog Interface for Gmane?

• Advance in the buzzword-compliant feature policy of Gmane. After RSS, now it's time to add blog features to the system
• Nicer web appeal: truly CSS modifiable designs, if admin interfaces are placed...
• A blog way of posting, replying, will increase interaction in the lists (I believe)
• More fame for Gmane, more visits, more GoogleAd clicks.
• The Blog/mailing list intersection... There is talk about that over there in Internet, but I doubt if that grial has ever been found. Now, this is an opportunity for Gmane. It pionereed usenet/list intersection. Now, one step further. After that, it will time for wold domination.

Of course, I am afraid that a terrible amount of coding would be needed if such a thing should be made... But well, there's the idea. Free idea, of course.

The 2-letter codes are more usual (iso 639-1), in Internet, I would say, than the 3-letter iso code (iso 639-2)

Another way is to mark a country code for more specific locales, as en_us, en_uk etc...

I've seen in translation memory systems, that when no country needs to be represented the following form is used sometimes: en_00

On a personal note, we Basques would prefer the 3-letter code eus instead of baq (both are valid). It's closer to the native name of our language, Euskara, and also closer to the 2-letter unique code: eu.

Iso codes for languages

Lars the Gmane-master has initiated a thread at gmane.discuss about a possible Gmane admin interface for list-admins to manage things. He asked how could admins use that, and I answered that i18n-l10n could be a good idea.

So, I told Lars:

One thing, first of all: translate interface message strings. That is, l10n in my language.

Obviously Gmane should go through i18n first... and it would be nice if it did so following the GNU standard, Gettext, as many other pieces of software have done (Mailman, for instance). If all interface messages were in a .po file, then translating the interface of a given list would be easy.

I personally admin 3 Basque lists hosted at Gmane. The proper way to translate the interfaces would not be taking strings one by one in each list, and then in the next one... I should be able to upload the .po file with all strings to every list I admin.

That way, it would be enough that just one non-English group admin translates a given message set, so that others can re-use it. For instance, Lars produces the Danish file. Then other group admins can follow (some repository could be created for submissions). I don't know how many non-English lists are there, but for those, this would be an interesting feature. For English language lists, well, perhaps someone might be tempted to change some messages for whatever reason, and there might be some usage of this feature, but obviously this is a feature for the other languages mainly.

Lars answered that gettext approach didn't match well with his PHP software... But he managed quickly to set up a system that works. Now, just 24 hours after the thread begun, Basque lists look Basque now, at least at a first glance.

Now, we want just more, you see... you feed us with a little bit of i18n, and we want MORE of it... The msg strings... From, Subject... Then the posting interface, date formats...

Gmane , terrific service, linking mailing-lists, Usenet groups, web archives and RSS feeds... Thanks to this last feature added, there's now a way to display Gmane postings of any newsgroup in any web page

1. Given the Gmane name of any newsgroup, get the RSS address of it. For instance, for the main Gmane.discuss group it is http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.discuss
2. Now visit http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/index.php?s=build . Enter your RSS address into the text field and select your preferred options (only titles, titles + description, number of items to show...)
3. Click on PREVIEW THE FEED until you get satisfied with the options, and then click on GENERATE JAVASCRIPT
4. On the next page, you'll find the Javascript you'll need to include the links on your site. Copy that code.
5. Paste that line of Javascript into the source of your Web page. Save. Load in a browser. There it is.
6. You can apply styles to re-design the appearence of the links displayed following information at this page

A Basque working example, with it's own explanation, at this page related to newsgroup gmane.culture.language.basque.dantzan

This is about a section we've named Jamaika at Sustatu.com, a Basque collective weblog. Sustatu is a sort-of-Kuro5hin, culture, tech and general interest issues posted and commented by visitors, but in a quite different scale: only 0.6 million people speak Basque.

There it is: www.sustatu.com/jamaika

PURPOSE: Posts in Sustatu are like in other collective weblogs as Kuro5hin or Slashdot: they're edited and moderated, and mostly are somehow ellaborate (a summary and then some more or less lengthy paragraphs). We just wanted to add another option (easier, more straightforward) to readers and editors: a link and a comment, just a few words. Another channel for more telegraphic news items from the net: a curiosity, breaking news, an invitiation to visit a given site...

SOLUTION: We solved the issue with del.icio.us. It's simple: we invit users to add what they like to del.icio.us with a specific tag: sustaturako (for Sustatu, in Basque, a particular term that probably will not be used by anyone else, if not to let their reference be listed at Sustatu). Then we parse the RSS file of that tag's page at del.icio.us and there it is.

SOFTWARE: Sustatu.com is a Zope website and for this del.icio.us thing we added an app based in Mark Pilgrim's Feed Parser written in Python. It's cached and fed every 30 minutes, so the latest additions at del.icio.us/tag/sustaturako appear shortly afterwards at www.sustatu.com/jamaika

We announced this feature last week, and added a page with explanations. Few Basques use del.icio.us, as far as we know. So, the how-to page includes quite detailed instructions. We also encourage users to make full use of del.icio.us for their bookmarking and reference work, not just as a way to feed Sustatu.

The name for the feature is Jamaika ikusteko jaio gara, a false quotation by Bob Marley. In English it means, we have been born to see Jamaica which is just nonsense, but in Basque it has 2nd and 3rd meanings, both very funny and fitting to this feature.

Tim Foster, i18n engineer at Sun. Nice blog added to my feed reader.

His explanations about TM are really useful and interesting. Also hints that the tools they use at Sun could be useful for the OpenOffice folks. There are rumours, Tim probably knows better of course, that Solaris would go as free software... Certainly, if Sun's TM system and translation management software is packed and released as free software, that would be a landmark for people working in i18n with free software.

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