Nerd Life

Okay, with the first beta-testers testing b2evolution I am beggining to feel an urgent need to localize the software. I was running most of my pages with french text (like "laisser un commentaire") and the testers want english (that is at least english!) :-/

Right now I just switched back everything to english but I do need to localize this. Actually, I needed this anyway for my own site. I will eventually do it as planned and links like "leave a comment" will be displayed in the current post's language.

On blogs like this one, were posts are mixed in multiple languages (yeah I know it's a little strange, but this is Europe... :>>) that means I must have several languages handy at all times.

So I was thinking about putting the strings into arrays... but this may not be as straightforward as I could have thought, as I need to take care of several things:

• Make it efficient
• Make it readable in the source code. Replacing 'leave a comment' with $uistring[49][$lang] won't do it!
• Make it easy for contributors to translate the whole product

Gotta think about it some more... ;)

Top referer: Erik's Erik's The Truth is Out There....

Top refering search engine: Google.fr

Want some more? There you have them: real-time statistics linked somewhere on the right! :D

Of course this is only a partial view of what's available in the backoffice! ;)

We have talked about the annoying BlogNoise problem before. And most bloggers have agreed that Google would probably be smart enough to fix the problem shortly in order to provide a better service to their users.

A great part of the BlogNoise is generated by the fact alone that we - bloggers - have so many unrelated posts/subjects on the same web page. And when we - bloggers - link to each other, we let the indexing robots follow these links and then index a lot of crap at the other end. This is because, most of the time, the permalinks we refer to, just point right into the middle of a monthly archive page with so many different subjects!

I have suggested a technical google-side solution using RSS, but the more I think about it, the more I am getting convinced that it is not Google's job to fix this! It is rather our bloggers' duty to fix this!

We have created crap on the Internet; now we just have to clean up!

The blogger-side solution is actually quite simple: all we need to do is stop using permalinks pointing right into the middle of monthly archives! We need to make the permalinks point to single posts (possibly with comments and trackback). This way, when someone refers to the post, and later the indexing robot follows the link, it will only index a single post. And all the keywords being indexed will actually be related to that post! No more indexing soup mixing hundreds of unrelated keywords from dozens of unrelated posts!

Still, some questions remain:

• What happens with the old permalinked posts?
• How do we exclude navigation from indexing? (this is actually a general question about indexing the web)
• And last but not least: Do bloggers actually want clean indexing? Or rather, do they prefer to continue flattering themselves with all those illegitimate search-result-hits that so easily rocket up their monthly hit counts? And it's even better when you consider unique visitors!
  
  Let me add that this is very contradictory with another typical blogger trend stating, in the name of interoperability and public's interest, that the only valid markup is the latest XHTML DTD!

PS: I like interop. I like standards. I am doing my best to support them. And I AM working on cleaning up my permalinks. I'll get less google hits... but hits don't matter! What you want from now on is increasing your google-hit satisfaction ratio! You want no more visitors coming to your blog by mistake! :P

Here is a quick list of improvements I made to the original b2 0.6.1 lately:

• New key features:
  
  • "View last comments" feature
  • Each post can be assigned multiple categories
  • Posts can be spread across multiple blogs
  • Statistics based on logging of Referers, User Agents, etc... on blog pages and RSS feeds
  • Comments, trackback and pingback can now be displayed on same page
• Backoffice improvements:
  
  • Improved standard markup buttons (support for strong, em, etc.)
  • All those little smileys can now be easily inserted by clicking them like a button
  • Possibility to send trackback and/or pingback as an afterthought (multiple trackbacks allowed)
  • Displaying progress while sending trackbacks, pingbacks and pinging various sites
  • b2 can now live in its own subfolder (does not have to be in blog root folder)
• Other improvements:
  
  • Performance: Reduced # of SQL queries per page
  • Performance: Optional generation of static home pages for each blog
  • Various bug patches
  • Standards: Various XHTML markup patches

I kind of started tweaking my b2 out of impatience waiting for a new version, and also because I thought it was an interesting way to refresh my PHP/mySQL knowledge... But this is obviously starting to get out of control! The time spent on this is begining to add up to something quite significant! :roll:

Thus, I am considering releasing this as open source. Though, some parts of the code are far from release condition... and if you have looked into b2 before, you may know the ground wasn't super healthy anyway :-/

So... if you are interested in this b2 evolution and you want to heavy-beta-test it, wether you've been using b2 or not in the past, please drop me a line ;)

Information overload!

The issue has been hitting weblogs quite a while ago, and that's why we have RSS. But stil, we need to narrow down the flow of information our aggregators feed us with daily!

One solution would be Bayesian Filtering in the aggregator.

As far as I am concerned, I will be providing category selection on my RSS feeds shortly (as weel as an aggregated feed for all my blogs). That should let you aggregate only the subjects you care about. ;)