Shopify (a nice online shop creator) revealed internationalization support a few days ago.

Even more interesting is the way they do translations: crowdsourcing. In their words:

Shopify brings the crowdsourcing concept to the internationalization problem. Any Shopify user can create their own language templates, apply to help edit other language templates, or simply utilize other translated language templates. The original creator of a translation will lead the translation team. He or she can accept and decline assistance and will be notified of any new language strings that come online with new content that affects the checkout process or the PDF order receipts.

A smart solution to a difficult problem. Since I support a multilingual application (Cheez - translated in 18 languages) I would like to have solved this problem in a better way. As it is people send me translations / corrections but I have to do the final editing, merging and including in the application package.

My DSL line was down for the last 2 days, so I had to fall back to dial-up (56kbps that is). I can’t believe how accustomed I have become to broadband! It seemed impossible to download anything… even mail seemed hard to cope with.

I’m glad it’s back.

I was playing with archive.org earlier today and I checked rapidsignal.com. The current site is not listed (strange) but I discovered the domain was used in 2002 - 2003. But it was only some kind of spam / ad site.

Barenaked App is a blog describing the building of Carson Systems second web application, named Amigo.

It’s extremely interesting as it details most everything: how they designed the application, budget information, hiring freelancers etc. The blog is live since February, but I only found it today (through WorkHappy.net).

Correction: The blog went live today… it just has posts going back to February.

As I was writing in this post, PageRank was updating for http://rapidsignal.com/. It is now a little over a month since this started and the PR is now stable again (at least that’s what all PR tools report). Thankfully it stabilized on 6!

About a week ago I noticed that http://rapidsignal.com/ was sometimes having a PageRank of 6 (I see this in Google Toolbar). So I started checking http://www.pageranktool.net/ regularly, which checks a URL’s PageRank in multiple Google servers.

PR is constantly changing: sometimes most servers report a PR6 while other times half the servers report a PR5 and half a PR6. For two days now very few servers report a PR5. I hope it stabilizes on 6 :-)

I have no idea what triggered this change. It’s not like I suddenly got many new incoming links or anything. Not that I complain. On the other hand my position for relative searches hasn’t changed, from what I can see, so I’m not sure what’s the benefit of higher PR. Maybe better positioning will come in time or maybe I am not targeting keywords effectively.

Here are some completely useless but fun stats about Magna CRM.

Code, icons, help:

• 174 PHP files
• 26.613 lines of PHP code (including comments and empty lines)
• 999.853 bytes of PHP code (including comments and white space)
• 28 icons
• 1 JavaScript file
• 2 CSS files
• 24 html help pages with 16 accompanying images

Other:

• 25 Database tables
• 539 localization strings
• 160 resolved items in bug database (FogBugz)
• 369 subversion commits (I tend to do way too many commits, e.g. a typo in a comment may get it’s own file commit)

Site:

• 66 files
• 16 images

I follow ToDoOrElse.com by Bob Walsh (author of Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality), where he writes interesting things on GTD. But I have to admit that at least as far as coding is involved, there is only one rule that works for me:

Open the editor and force myself to start coding.

Sometimes I write bad code this way which I later have to rewrite, but at least I don’t start the endless loop of checking email, reading forums / blogs, surfing etc. Unfortunately this brute force approach doesn’t work with other tasks.

I started using the Firefox icon () for the “feed subscribe” action. I never liked either the XML or RSS icons. Even Microsoft will use that icon in IE7 and Office 12, so why not me ;-)

Grab it in many formats from feedicons.com.

Overview is going to specialize in the development of reusable components for PHP developers.

The cool thing is they were inspired by some posts by Ian and myself.

I feel quite excited about the new year. I wasn’t able to release Magna CRM by the end of 2005 as I had planned, but I am close now. Probably it will be released by the end of January, after a public beta and after I finish some miscellaneous stuff (back-end tasks, design issues etc).

This has been a hectic week for me, testing Magna CRM on all kinds of supported platforms: PHP4, PHP5, IIS/CGI, IIS/SAPI, Apache, Windows, Linux, Access, MySQL, SQL Server etc (I’ll write more on that in another post).

In the meantime, I played a bit with Squidoo. I had started a lens while it was on private beta, but now I put some content and published it. Being the unimaginative person I am, my lens is on CRM software.

Squidoo is technically interesting. It’s the most “complete” Ajax web application I’ve worked with (except Google maps). Other services like Flickr or Basecamp have some Ajax features here and there, but Squidoo’s lens editing page uses Ajax for everything. I think I mostly liked its interface as editing was easy and fast. Not that my jaw dropped like when I saw Google maps (or that fluxiom video teaser).

Now I don’t really have any real business experience of this kind, but it buffles me why Joyent bought TextDrive and not the other way around.

I understand the two companies share founders / owners /executives, so I make the assumption that this was a strategic decision, not a financial one. But TextDrive has a well known brand while no one knows Joyent (at least for now). It seems more logical to me for a hosting company to offer software products (Joyent’s products, Strongspace etc) than the other way around. Moreover Joyent’s products are still untried, so what happens if they don’t do well? Wouldn’t that hurt TextDrive’s name?

Anyway I guess these people know what they are doing, but I would like to read a better analysis on this.

In addition to the tasks I described here, I am now testing Acronis TrueImage, to create complete images of my hard disk. So, in case of a hard disk failure I would be up and running in no time (at least in theory).

However TrueImage makes me feel a bit uneasy, as it lets me continue working while it creates the image! Anyway, I am quite sure TrueImage works correctly, as it gets rave reviews everywhere and everyone recommends it.

Also I’ve made up my mind that my next notebook will have two hard disks and a RAID controller (like this one), so I can have mirroring.

For some reason Google has a different PageRank for rapidsignal.com and www.rapidsignal.com.

No big deal really, but it bothered me a bit. So I added this rule to .htaccess to fix it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.rapidsignal.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://rapidsignal.com/$1 [R=301,L]


This way I got rid of the www part once and for all, which I also find nicer. I used a 301 Permanent redirect hoping Google will understand that a search for link:http://rapidsignal.com/blog/ and a search for link:http://www.rapidsignal.com/blog/ should return the same results.