Simpy Chichimichi

Here is a little tutorial about setting your language preferences in your Web browser. Although the explanation uses Simpy for examples, the tutorial is really applicable to any Web site that offers content/UI in multiple languages. I hope you find this useful.

By default, Simpy's user interface (UI) is in English. Besides English, Simpy's UI is currently available in almost a dozen other languages. As the number of languages/translations supported by Simpy is growing (I'll announce a few new languages in the next 24 hours), and now that several people have already emailed me to ask where and how they can switch to using their language of choice, it's time I show how to see Simpy in a language other than Simpy.

To set your preferred language, you need to change the language settings of your Web browser. In other words, you do not need to look for the language setting in your Simpy preferences - it is not there - your language preference is set in your browser. Thus, what you need to do is configure your browser and tell it what all the languages you can read are, and tell it which language you prefer. For example, you may read Spanish and a little bit of Traditional Chinese, but French is your native tongue, so you will probably want to add all three languages to your browser: French as the preferred language, followed by Spanish, and finally Traditional Chinese.

To help you understand what happens after you add multiple languages to your browser, let's go through an example. Let's assume you added French, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese to your browser, as I described above. This is what happens when you access Simpy.com:

Your Browser: My user can read French and that's his/her preferred language. He/she can also read Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. Thus, if you have the UI in French, please show me that French UI. If not, give me the Spanish UI, if you have it. If you have neither French nor Spanish, give me Traditional Chinese, if you have it.

Simpy: OK. I don't have a translation for French, but I do have a translation for Spanish, and also for Traditional Chinese. Since your user prefers Spanish to Traditional Chinese, here is the UI in Spanish.

Thus, by adding language(s) to your browser, you instruct it to tell the sites you visit which languages you can read, and what your language of choice is. If this explanation (in English) doesn't help, take a look at the screenshots below. The first screenshot shows how to add languages to Internet Explorer 7. The second screenshot shows how to add languages to Firefox.

Internet Explorer: Language Settings

Firefox: Language Settings

Both screenshots are clickable, so if you need a bigger version of the screenshot for easier reading, just click on the image.

Short and geekly sweet this post will be. I've talked about crawlers and aggregators and how they affect web site traffic patterns twice in the past: first in Web 2.0 Tagging Study, Part 4: Nocturnal Activity Pattern, and then in Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 Web Activity Pattern.

In order to get a better understanding of Simpy's usage, I wanted to weed out the numerous crawlers and aggregators that constantly hit Simpy, crawl it, fetch its web pages and suck its feeds. As Simpy uses Apache web server, this was quite simple to do, using mod_setenvif Apache module. The following is a snippet from Simpy's web server configuration file:

CustomLog /log/apache/access_log combined env=!DoNotLog
CustomLog /log/apache/robot_log combined env=ROBOT

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
  ## you need to make all this be a single line
  BrowserMatchNoCase "Feed|Google Desktop|Bloglines|Teoma|NaverBot|msnbot|Googlebot|
  Slurp|crawler|Crawler|rojonet|NewsGator|MagpieRSS|PubSub-RSS|AppleSyndication|
  ZyBorg|ia_archiver|kinjabot|Yahoo-Blogs|BecomeBot|Blogslive|Blogpulse|SBIder|
  NetNewsWire|ping.blo.gs|RssBandit|Baiduspider" ROBOT=1 DoNotLog=1
</IfModule>

Clearly, the trick is to list all user agents that you want to exclude, set an environment variable, and then use that variable to do conditional logging of web requests. You will notice that my configuration is a bit redundant, as I could really accomplish the same with only 1 variable.

This is obviously not rocket science, but I find it useful to log human and non-human requests separately, and I thought I'd share this, in case anyone else wants to do the same.

In the original Simpify for Blogs I provided several HTML snippets that you can stick in your blogs and let your blog readers save and tag your posts in Simpy. Unfortunately, I managed to make a mistake in the snippet for WordPress, as well as Movable Type and TypePad (that's about 50% error, I really have to pat myself on the back for this one). The snippets are now corrected. If you use WordPress, get the correct snippet here, and if you use Movable Type or TypePad, the correct HTML snippet is here.

Another Simpy Chichimichi reader, Kossatsch, also provided the following HTML snippet for users of Textpattern blogging software:

Finally, note that all HTML snippets have extra spaces in them, and you have to remove these spaces when pasting the HTML in your blog template. I had to put the spaces there in order to force the snippets to wrap inside the blog post page. The spaces are in front of '?href' and in front of '&title'.

I've noticed more and more people putting "Add to Simpy" links to their blog posts. Let me say this right away - I appreciate this very much! To help others do the same, here is some information that will let you integrate Simpy into your blog.

In this post I'll cover integration with the following blogging platforms:

• Blogger/Blogspot
• WordPress
• Movable Type & TypePad
• Blojsom

First of all here are the images/buttons you can use. Alternatively, use text (e.g "Simpify" or "Add to Simpy" will do).

.......... if you want to save the image locally, get it here

.......... if you want to save the image locally, get it here

The basic setup is captured by the HTML snippet in this box:

If you are tech/web/HTML savvy and know your blog templates, you can stop reading here, and stick the above HTML snippet in the template for you blog posts. You probably want to put this in the header or footer of the template.

Blogger/Blogspot

WordPress

Movable Type & TypePad

Blojsom

The other day I blogged about WordPress Support for Posting to Simpy. This allows anyone reading your WordPress blog to save your post into their Simpy account.

But wouldn't it also be nice to get WordPress to automatically save your new blog posts into your Simpy account?

Aleksey Gureev, a BlogBridge developer, was kind enough to add Simpy support to WordPress, by extending his Bookmarker Plugin.

This means that, if you have a WordPress-powered blog, you can have all your new blog posts automatically published in Simpy. This is big! This means you no longer have to manually add your blog posts to Simpy after publishing them - it happens automatically.

Aleksey's Bookmarker Plugin download and installation steps are here. Thank you, Aleksey!

In the last post I showed how you can easily search your Simpy bookmarks directly from your Mozilla or Firefox browser. But Simpy also offers Notes, which are also taggable and searchable, so it would be nice to be able to search them directly from the browser, too.

If you are a Firefox/Mozilla user and want a quick way to search your Simpy bookmarks from the browser without having to explicitly visit www.simpy.com, here is what you can do.

1. Search your Simpy links and bookmark (in your browser!) the resulting page.
2. Open that bookmark's Properties dialog window in your browser. You should see a dialog similar to the following screenshot:



3. Edit the Location field to make it look like the field in the above image.
4. Edit the Keyword field to make it look like the field in the above image. I use "sy" keyword, but you can enter anything you like (e.g. "s" or "simpy" or ...)
5. Save your bookmark changes and try it out! Use your Keyword shortcut and enter some search terms in your browser's Location field. In the screenshot below I entered "sy blogs", which will search my Simpy links for the term "blogs".



6. Obviously, you can go all the way, and use more complex queries directly in your browser, as shown in the following screenshot.

Enjoy!

Martin from TipMonkies just added "Post to Simpy" to his WordPress-powered blog. I asked Martin to describe how he did it, and here is what he said, slightly paraphrased:

Here's the "Post to simpy" code:

<a href="http://simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?title=<?php the_title() ?>&href=<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Post to Simpy">Post to Simpy</a>

Pretty straightforward, really. You could use & instead of &amp; but then the page won't end up as valid XHTML so that's why I replaced that. Other variables (like notes for example) could be added to the link, but would require some extra work on the blogging software's side which is why they're not included. I suppose adding tags is possible as well but I, for example, don't use the same tags on TipMonkies as I do on del.icio.us though (I have much more precise tags on bookmarking sites, as can be seen here for example.)