Diacritiques

With Morgan Doocy — who, unlike me, actually knows how to code in PHP — I am working on a plugin to make WordPress comprehensively suitable for multilingual blogging.

Of course, we have a lot of ideas what we expect from a mulitlingual blogging tool (you may have noticed that this blog is already bilingual-and-a-half). These include optional multiple-language versions of any post, optional other-language summaries for posts that only exist in one (complete) version, multiple titles, correct “lang” and “xml:lang” attributes, switching the language of the entire blog, selectively switching any post to any language it exists in, preferred-language autodetection and cookie-saved reader choice, a link to WP localization …

Now I am looking for additional input. What would you expect from your tool if you run (or would be interested in running) a blog in several languages?

P.S.: Dave vouches for the Japanese in the title.

Apparently, I am not quite as indifferent to memes as I thought. I saw this one first posted by Rachel at a tear in the fabric of spacetime, and it’s spreading to some other sites I regularly visit.

The idea is the following: when you type a letter of the alphabet into your favourite browser’s address bar, which web page will be suggested first by the browser’s auto-completion feature? Here is what came up for me:

A — B — C — D — E — F — G — H — I — J — K — L — M — N — O — P — Q — R — S — T — U — V — W — X — Y — Z

Okay, I cheated a bit. I eliminated password protected pages, this site itself and a new project of mine that isn’t ready to be shown to the world just yet. I assume I am not the only one to bend the rules slightly.

Conclusions? Half a dozen of dictionaries is an awful lot, but accurately reflects my writing habits. Seven more links lead to language/linguistics pages. Most of the pages belong in the “terribly serious” category, but a few are a little more lighthearted. There’s a little less French than there would have been had I browsed my French bookmarks and favourite news sites this morning. None of them is a surprise.

Bloggers, this seems to be an emerging tradition, do some navel-gazing once in a while. Why do I blog? What do I blog? Where does blogging lead me? Who reads me? I have tried to avoid this, which I find difficult because I tend to do a lot of this sort of introspection. Still, I find it annoying to read (at least my own ruminations — others’ can hold my interest longer). So this entry is supposed to be an exception.  read the post »