Year: 2007

If you are not living in your own world, you probably know that for the last few days Greece and some neighboring countries were fighting with heavy fires. In Greece alone more than 50 people died already, with many villages destroyed and endangered. No doubt that this will negatively affect the Greek economy and people.

In times like this, any little help counts. You too can help. Most banks in Cyprus have opened accounts to make donations for the cause as fast and simple as possible. According to this Phileleftheros article, here are the bank account numbers:

Τράπεζα Κύπρου 0127-05-039591
Marfin Laiki 017-08-052078
Ελληνική Τράπεζα 105-10-407509-00
Συνεργατική Κεντρική Τράπεζα 40-02488-7
Τράπεζα Alpha 202-101-003225-4
Εθνική Τράπεζα της Ελλάδος 525/540732-7
Universal Bank 152-1-9999993-12012
Emporiki Bank 45310005058-03
Arab Bank 1301-402058-540
Eurobank EFG 200100000127
Societe General 32-38070-0081-01-4
Κυπριακή Τράπεζα Αναπτύξεως 300/00001174

With most banks supporting online transfers, your donation is only a few clicks away.

• Found this comment in my sources: // TODO : Find out if it is extremely dangerous. #
• "Do you mean that this system has no non-vital way of shooting oneself in the head with a shotgun?" (c) co-worker. #

• Laughing to tears… Joe Rogan about female power – http://tinyurl.com/2c492p <http://tinyurl.com/2c492p> #

• Choice FM sux big time. They are putting the same music over and over and over and over and over… #
• stepanov: will all that excellent free music out there… I don’t get it… it’s a freaking torture… #
• When was the last time you guys used the "Sitemap" feature on some web site? #
• @atw26: ok, thanks. So the issue is not to provide a Sitemap, but to fix the navigation, right? :) #
• @atw26: btw, do you know about Google way? search for "something site:blah.com". Searches only on a single site. #
• @atw26: what I am thinking about is – how can I provide a sitemap for my blog for example. 4,000+ pages there… #
• I think that Sitemap is more the thing of the past, then of a future. Search, better navigation and plenty of content make Sitemaps obso … #
• Actually, sitemap these days is decomposed to the list of categories, post archives, tag clouds, etc. #
• @atw26: publishing is getting easier by the day. That brings us to the situation with a lot of content pretty fast. #
• @atw26: so, pretty much everything will have a problem with sitemap. Like huge photoalbums are impossible to categorize #
• The.Coolest.Ware.Ever! I wonder how airport security reacts to it. I want one. http://tinyurl.com/yr5oys <http://tinyurl.com/yr5oys> #

The whole world is getting on the web. Most people out there use English as the Web language – there is just no other way, if you care about the size of your audience and the quality of search engine results around your web site.

But there are still those who provide content for single language speaking non-American visitors. Why should you care? I don’t know. Probably you shouldn’t. Unless you speak the language. Or unless they write something about you.

Enough with the introductory rumblings. Here is what happened. One of the foreign language blogs wrote something about my WordPress Bits project. Obviously, that’s something I’d want to understand, even if roughly and partially.

The problem is that I can’t quite figure out the language it is written in. And both Google Translate and Altavista BabelFish ask me to pick both the source and target languages to do the translation. While the target one is not a problem – I can make sense of English, Russian, and even a bit of Greek and German. But I don’t know which is the source language.

That happened to me before a few times, but I could always figure it out using secondary hints, such the location of the server (by IP address) or by the domain name of the web site. In this case though, I am somewhat lost – the server is hosted in the USA and the domain is a regular .com .

Gladly, the WHOIS record of the domain suggested a relationship with Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. The Wikipedia page confirmed that the language spoken over their is Portugues, and, suddenly, BabelFish is a useful tool again.

Its blog uses WordPress as brain and after some time you simply tired of only personalizing its blog using plugins and existing subjects. If it does not despair. Blog is possible to personalize its still more learning as it functions. The best one to make it is to have access always blog WordPress Bits and to implement some of the tips that are published.

Good enough for me.

Resume. Feature request: guess the source language, especially if it’s one of the supported languages. Leave an option for the user to select, but do the hard stuff automatically. Especially, judging by the results of the wrongly selected language – it would be trivial. Most of the content won’t get translated and will remain the same. Anyway, if someone figured out who to do automatic translations for so many languages, I guess picking the right source language is an easy thing to do.