Pi in the Sky

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Small notes

If you don’t know: you can change the language of the site by clicking in the colored e (for english) or the colorless ñ (for spanish) located at the left side of the top section in each page.

For each article which is in another language, you’ll find one of those icons in the header of the article. If there’s nothing there, then the article is only in one language. Note that if you click the icon in the article (instead of the ones at the top section), you will change language and you’ll be directed to the article.

You can also set the wallpaper clicking over any thumbnail in the top section. Some wallpapers tile, others stay on the bottom left. The last thumbnail (the one which looks like clock rays) selects a random wallpaper.

The top section also contains some links to what I think are pages which come handy for navigation, plus a link to Meta.EligeOtraVez.net.

Bilingualism

I consider myself almost a bilingual person. My native language is spanish, and although I left studies quite young, and never studied it properly, I’m proficient in written english. Sometimes I write stuff in english, sometimes I write it in spanish. Although not always in both… So I didn’t only need localization for the site, I needed support for multilanguage. Almost all WordPress plugins for multilanguage rely on two things: all posts will be in all configured languages, and the theme is properly localized. Those two requirements are a no-no for me. I didn’t intend to make translations for everything I write, and most themes aren’t localized.

However, in the end I decided to go that way, and offer some incomplete bilingualism. This means that the whole site is bilingual, but some of the content is only offered in one language. How I choose in which languages I write is entirely context-dependant or stochastic, whatever you prefer.

Tech

The site is built locally in an AMP server I maintain for development (Apache, MySQL y PHP). I can do anything comfortably and then upload to the host. The main part of the site (blog, articles and stuff) is powered by WordPress. It uses the theme Vistered Little, with a skin I made for it based in the default skin. I’ve made a few changes both to WordPress and to the theme, to suit my needs, including complete localization (Vistered Little is not localized as of now).

Vistered Little (and WordPress itself) makes heavy use of tricky CSS properties, which might not render properly in all browsers. I’ve tested the finished site with Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, and Opera 9. Vistered Little is reported to work well with Safari. There might be minor differences between all these browsers, but at least it works. Please tell me if there’s some problem! It’s known to not work well with lower versions of IE such as 5.5. Still, Internet Explorer 6 is old and buggy, start using Firefox now!

For localization, I use Language Switcher, not only because it’s an excellent multilingual plugin for WordPress, but also because the author, Jennifer Hodgon, has a great article called Creating a Multilingual Blog with WordPress, which was an awesome guide for the localization of this site. Still, both the theme and a lot of plugins needed localization support and I had to localize some things, and hack some multilanguage support into some other things, mainly plugins and Vistered Little.

Although I run the site with a lot of WordPress plugins, I’d like to mention Random Quotes, because from first day, I really wanted to display random quotes. Donkey Quote is more powerful and suited to what I wanted, but it refuses to work here for some reason. Random Quotes is still great, and I only wish it would support quote categories or something. A blog without quotes is like a cake without a cherry on top!

Complete rundown of components, credits, and thanks:

• Apache HTTP Server 2.0.59 (for the local server).
• PHP 4.4.6 (for the local server).
• MySQL Community Server 4.1.22 (for the local server).
• Hosted at MochaHost.
• Blog powered by WordPress 2.1.3.
• WordPress theme: Vistered Little 1.7.2 by Nik Iliadis and Windy Road.
• Multilanguage provided with Language Switcher 1.05 plugin, by Jennifer Hogdon.
• Theme & skins plugins: Presentation Toolkit 0.0.3 & Skinner 0.0.2, both by Windy Road.
• Miscellaneous plugins:
  • Articles 1.1 and Link Harvest 1.0 by Alex King.
  • Contact Form II 2.0.13 by Chip Cuccio.
  • Fold Page List 1.74 by Rob Schumann.
  • Just One Category 0.3 by Michael D. Adams.
  • Random Quotes 1.3 by Dustin Barnes.
  • Really Simple Sitemap by Dominic Foster.
  • Search Everything 3.01 by Dan Cameron.
  • Top Level Categories 0.1 by Filipe Fortes.
  • Wordpress Database Backup 2.0.3 by Austin Matzko.
  • onAirNow 1.7f by Daniel M. Gattermann.
• Now Playing 2.1.2 by Antti & Lauri Nevala, a plugin for WinAmp to feed song information to onAirNow (using a custom script available on request).
• Pi “cross” logotype by Richard.
• Wallpapers mostly from Mayang’s Textures, but tiled by me.

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Pi in the Sky is powered by WordPress. Dressed with Vistered Little. Hosted at MochaHost.