Nerd Life

b2evolution.net has been hosted for the last 6 months, courtesy of Memenet. That seems to be over and Memenet cannot be contacted, at least for the past 24 hours... :-/

Well, it was good while it lasted...

I am now seeking a new generous host for the project. If you are in a position to provide quality hosting for the b2evolution.net site, please let me know asap. We gotta get that site back online, I receive a lot of email asking for it! ;)

My real life has been holding me off from blogging and all that stuff for the last month. However, as I was sick and staying at home for the last two days, as there was nothing on TV (I really oughta get that satellite dish!), I pulled out my Dreamweaver...

First, I conscientiously fixed all open bugs on b2evolution and released a maintaince package. Then I went on playing with the homepage at http://b2evolution.net/ .

Check out that totally fluid 3 column layout. Try resizing the window. Try changing the font size. What do you think? ;)

By the way, tweaking with CSS layouts is a very efficient way to kill time! :>>

Anyway, the most interesting part of that new homepage is in the right column. There is a list of recently updated b2evolution blogs. I had added a feature in version 0.8.6 where b2evo sends a ping to its homesite everytime it is used to post a blog somewhere on the internet (unless you disabled that pinging in the conf). These pings actually get stored and here they come out of the darkness.

Now the homepage is different everytime I visit it and I can see b2evolution in action even when I don't feel like blogging myself! :D

Okay, enough self pride...

I am currently considering using GNU gettext utilities to internationalize b2evolution.

I'm not done reading the docs, but right now I just felt like I needed to work this out:

The gettext manual has this totally valid understanding about preparing translatable string:

Hardcoded string concatenation is sometimes used to construct English strings:

strcpy (s, "Replace ");
strcat (s, object1);
strcat (s, " with ");
strcat (s, object2);
strcat (s, "?");

In order to present to the translator only entire sentences, and also because in some languages the translator might want to swap the order of object1 and object2, it is necessary to change this ...

This sounds very wise... but the "solution" leaves me baffled:

...change this to use a format string:

sprintf (s, "Replace %s with %s?", object1, object2);

Okay... how exactly am I supposed to swap the order of the objects? Swap %s with %s... ? yeah, right... :crazy:

(For those of you familiar with C but not with translation, rememenber that the translator can only act upon the string "Replace %s with %s?", not upon the sprintf statement.)

Update: Doh! Just learnt something kewl about printf syntax! :. Solution is easy:

sprintf (s, "Replace %1$s with %2$s?", object1, object2);

And there's no reason to specify those order numbers until you need to change the order... well, actually there is a reason: give a hint to the translator who "may not" be a printf syntax expert... :!:

b2evolution version 0.8.2 is on its way...

You can get a sneak preview here: http://b2evolution.net/demo/

There are 42 enhancements over the last public release. Can you find them all ?

PS: this is Release Candidate 1, so expect one or two little bugs... but they should be even harder to find than the last 2 enhancements... at least I hope so :P

Update: some kid must have found it funny to change the password for the demouser allowing you to access the backoffice... Bleh! :-/ It's back now... with a lock so it doesn't get changed again... This is sooo lame...

Looks like the Echo Project Roadmap is getting a pretty wide acceptance in what we probably could call the ~`blogging industry'~ by now.

I definitely plan to support Echo in b2evolution... RSS has been such a mess for such a long time... something really has to change...

(I hope they'll move this project to some decent place though... the project is still small be the Wiki that hosts it is already a headache to navigate... :>> but I won't say more on this... since it's been up for 3 weeks now I think and I still haven't moved on with the new b2evo website :. )