Jianjun's Blog

A few Twitter users reported today that they were seeing partially localized text on Twitter web interface. Currently, localized text strings are often mixed with English, and text language changes according to your browser settings.

The following picture shows Chinese with English when I used Safari Chinese version:

Here’s another screen shot showing French mixed with English when I viewed the page with my French version of FireFox:

And I have a feeling that they are still testing the pages before going on with the full-scale internationalization – anyway a nice development out there!

Google Docs is Google’s online document processing and sharing application. With it, you can upload/create/share documents, spreadsheets or presentations. You have the choices to keep them private, share them conditionally or even publish them directly to your blog (Isn’t this cool?).

Protected with an encrypted access (https), your documents rest comfortably in their own folders. The tree structure on the left provides all kinds of filtering possibilities to facilitate easy search and organization. Change notifications via E-mail keep you up-to-date when a collaborator made a change to a shared document. ‘Changed-by-whom’ and ‘changed time/date’ information is also clearly visible from the document list. Unlike many web-based programs, Google Docs supports perfect context-sensitive right-click menus; you’ll feel ‘at home’ as if it’s an application installed on your PC.

I have been using Google Docs in my web localization work for over half an year. We set up a QA spreadsheet where web site staff put in user feedback or the latest changes for the localization team (translator and proofreader) to make necessary modifications or a comment.

Microsoft also has a similar online application – Office Live Workspace – as an extension to its Office software. However, its stability, speed and usability are far from comparable with Google Docs. I do enjoy its Office plug-in which enables direct save/opening documents to/from Workspace. Unfortunately, this is the only thing that is useful to me but at the same time ignorable.

For those who still don’t know what Feedjit is: it’s a real-time traffic monitoring service. By putting a Feedjit widget on your blog, you will see live visitor information such as where the visitors came from, how they came and their landing page. The widget is highly customizable so you can personalize it to fit your blog’s color scheme. It works fine for a sidebar display, cute with all those small national/regional flags and clickable links to traffic sources. On the other hand, Feedjit also offers visitors an option to turn off the monitor, so next time around their information won’t be logged and show up again.

Due to the great popularity of the service, Feedjit recently (I noticed it since last Friday, March 7, 2008) seems to experience frequent technical difficulties. The space where visitor information is usually displayed often becomes empty and obviously some visitor information is not logged. Their home page put up a notice saying scheduled maintenance was underway from x time – y time. Then, after it came back for a few hours, it was down again with a similar notice.

As a fan of Feedjit, I hope they can solve the problem soon and continue their great service with even better stability. To get your own Feedjit code, simply visit their home page.