Planet material

[Dimitris Glezos]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 07:08:56AM -0500, Michael Tiemann wrote:
>> Máirín Duffy wrote:
>> >Hi Jon,
>> >
>> >William Jon McCann wrote:
>> >>I think we'd be a little put off if mailing lists, wikis, bugs, or IRC
>> >>conversations were conducted in many languages at the same time.  For
>> >>these we've adopted a lingua franca.  I propose we do the same for the
>> >>"default" Fedora Planet feed.
>> >
>> >Many multilingual posters post both in their native tongue and
>> >also provide an English translation on the bottom. What do you
>> >think about those posts and their appropriateness for the main
>> >planet feed?
>> I think they rock!  I think they shout from the rooftops that this
>> is an international community, and an inclusive one, too.
>
> I love the fact that we have people conversing about Fedora on their
> blogs from around the world.  In fact, my bet is that we're missing a
> big chunk of conversation going on internationally, and that not
> everyone involved is including their material in our feed.
>
> But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that (sadly) I'm not much
> of a polyglot other than some German -- our German friends know my
> limitations pretty well :-) -- so I can't read or respond to most of
> these posts in any effective way.  Machine translation isn't usually
> helpful especially when reading nuances.
>
> I would love to be able to select languages and topics for what I see
> on the Planet, with the default being all topics for the lingua franca
> only.  I don't know how one achieves this with the planet software we
> use; perhaps it comes down to having some sort of app wrapping around
> the planet to provide these features.

Here's a development approach that comes in mind:

 1. Read the blog post's tags in case it finds the name of a language
there. If none, guess the language and if the guess has a high enough
confidence, categorize it under the specific language, otherwise,
assume it's English. Store the association between blog post -
language on a DB.
 2. Make specific languages available under http://planet.fpo/l/en+fr+de/.
 3. Allow the user to select the languages he understands on the
sidebar. Store them in a cookie.
 4. Show in sidebar only feeds which are blogging in my languages.
 5. Use the browser's default language to highlight blog posts which
are in my native language.

-d




-- 
Dimitris Glezos

Transifex: The Multilingual Publishing Revolution
http://www.transifex.net/ -- http://www.indifex.com/