Simpy Chichimichi

Simpy International: Browser Language Settings How-to

2007-01-29T06:09:23-05:00

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.

Simpify for Roller Blogs

2006-07-29T13:19:07-04:00

In the past I've provided information how to add "Simpify" functionality to your blog. Here I provided instructions, code, and images for Blogger and Blogspot, Wordpress, Movable Type and TypePad, and for Blojsom. Thanks to this blog, we now have the information for adding "Simpify" functionality to blogs powered by Roller, the blogging software used by Sun, that now lives under the Apache Software Foundation roof.

To add "Simpify" button to each post on my a (J)Roller blog, I modified the (J)Roller template (the _day one) and added the 3 little icons that let people save the post to either Simpy, or del.icio.us, or digg it. To do that, I added a (Velocity) macro:

   #macro ( entryButtons $entry )

    // NOTE: you will want to change this URL
    #set ( $IMAGES = "http://jroller.com/resources/o/otis" )
    #set ( $entryURL = "$absBaseURL/page/$userName?anchor=$entry.anchor" )
    #set ( $catname = $entry.Category.Name )

    <div class="ta-entry-footer">

      <a href="http://simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?title=$entry.title&href=$entryURL=$entry.anchor">
         <img src="$IMAGES/simpy-icon-16x16.png" title="Save to Simpy"></a>

      <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=$entryURL;title=$entry.title">
         <img src="$IMAGES/delicious-16x16.gif" title="Post to de.licio.us"></a>

      <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=$entryURL&title=$entry.title">
         <img src="$IMAGES/digg-16x16.png" title="Digg this entry"></a>
    </div>
  #end

You can paste this macro right before the "#foreach( $entry in $entries )" loop, and inside the loop just add "#entryButtons( $entry )".

When you are done, you will have sexy little buttons there, just like Tiago!

Identifying And Counting Feed Agents

2006-05-23T23:56:48-04:00

A reader made a good suggestion in the comments of the Discovering Feed Agents post. I took that a bit further:

grep 'FOO' /log/apache/aggregator_log | cut -d' ' -f12 | sed 's/"//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

This yields a list of the feed agents that most often hit your blog. Here are top 20 for this blog:

   2685 Mozilla/5.0
   2115 Bloglines/3.0-rho
   1163 Sphere
   1094 Feedfetcher-Google;
    812 Mozilla/4.0
    288 Java/1.5.0_06
    286 WinkTagBot/1.0
    280 YahooFeedSeeker/2.0
    266 NewsGatorOnline/2.0
    168 MagpieRSS/0.79a
    110 PluckFeedCrawler/2.0
    102 MagpieRSS/0.72
     96 Tagyu/1.1
     96 Fotki
     88 Pageflakes/1.0
     80 FeedBurner/1.0
     77 AttensaOnline/1.0
     57 FeedBlendr.com
     56 ping.blo.gs/2.0
     53 edgeio-retriever

Discovering Feed Agents

2006-05-19T12:37:33-04:00

If you read my previous post about Men vs. Machines, and are interested in that kind of stuff, try this with your web server logs:

grep 'FOO' /log/apache/access_log | cut -d' ' -f12 | sort | less

Of course, "FOO" is just a placeholder. Use the portion of the URL that marks your feed (e.g. on Simpy it would be "/rss", because all feed URLs start with "/rss").

The above will give you a full list of feed agents. If you want to see a list of unique agent names, use this:

grep 'FOO' /log/apache/access_log | cut -d' ' -f12 | sort | uniq | less

What is this list good for? It's good for figuring out feed agent names, so you can redirect their request to different log file, for instance. It's also good for discovering new feed-eating services and software out there. Simpy currently distinguishes 30+ different feed readers.

People-contributed Simpy Bookmarklets

2006-04-09T22:55:01-04:00

A couple of people recently wrote about various Simpy bookmarklets. Kpjas wrote about it here, and Don contributed 4 of his time-saving bookmarklets for Simpy. This goes well with the Super Fast Simpy This bookmarklet written by Benjamin. Thank you, folks!

FeedFlare Unit For Simpy

2006-03-21T00:07:04-05:00

For all of you using FeedBurner service for your feeds, you can now add a new FeedFlare unit to your FeedBurner feeds, and let your readers quickly and easily add your blog posts to their Simpy accounts.

A picture is worth a thousand words. How about a screenshot? Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about, with the "Add to Simpy" FeedFlare unit circled.

This FeedFlare unit lives at http://www.simpy.com/ff/feedflare-add-to-simpy.xml. This is the FeedFlare unit URL to enter into your FeedBurner accounts.

The credit for this FeedFlare unit goes to Ralph Inselsbacher. Thanks Ralph!

Crawlers and Aggregators and Apache Logging Tricks

2005-12-06T02:07:54-05:00

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.

Simpify for Blogs - Update

2005-12-01T22:23:38-05:00

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:

<a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do ?href=<txp:permlink/> &title=<txp:title />"><img src="http://www.simpy.com/img/simpify-white-56x24.png" alt="Simpify!" style="border-width: 0px;"/></a>.

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'.

Simpify for Blogs

2005-11-28T21:49:02-05:00

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

Even if you use a different blogging tool (e.g. Drupal), you will find this information useful. If you integrate Simpy with any other blogging platform, please let me know about integration details.

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

Pick your colour, and if you need a different background, feel free to change it, or let me know if you want the original file with layers, etc.

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

The Simpy cheatsheet for Blogger/Blogspot platform is:

YourBlogPostTitle = <$BlogItemTitle$>

YourBlogPostPermalink = <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

Plugging the information from this cheatsheet into out HTML snippet is easy, and the result is:

<a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do ?href=<$BlogItemUrl$> &title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.simpy.com/img/simpify-white-56x24.png" alt="Simpify!" style="border-width: 0px;"/></a>

For more information about Blogger/Blogspot template tags, check out the Template Tags section for Blogger.

WordPress

The Simpy cheatsheet for WordPress platform is:

YourBlogPostTitle = <?php the_title(); ?>

YourBlogPostPermalink = <?php the_permalink(); ?>

Plugging the information from this cheatsheet into out HTML snippet is easy, and the result is:

<a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do ?href=<?php the_permalink(); ?> &title=<?php the_title(); ?>"><img src="http://www.simpy.com/img/simpify-white-56x24.png" alt="Simpify!" style="border-width: 0px;"/></a>

WordPress Wiki has more information about WordPress Template Tags, and more Template Tags information can be found in WordPress Codex (WordPress Online Manual).

Movable Type & TypePad

The Simpy cheatsheet for Movable Type and TypePad is:

YourBlogPostTitle = <$MTEntryItemTitle$>

YourBlogPostPermalink = <$MTEntryItemPermalinkURL$>

Plugging the information from this cheatsheet into out HTML snippet is easy, and the result is:

<a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do ?href=<$MTEntryItemPermalinkURL$> &title=<$MTEntryItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.simpy.com/img/simpify-white-56x24.png" alt="Simpify!" style="border-width: 0px;"/></a>

You can get more information from Movable Type/TypePad's Template Tags help section. The subsection to look at is the section about Post Template Tags.

Blojsom

The Simpy cheatsheet for Blojsom is:

YourBlogPostTitle = $entry.getTitle()

YourBlogPostPermalink = $permalink

Plugging the information from this cheatsheet into out HTML snippet is easy, and the result is:

<a style="margin-left: 10px;" href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do ?href=$permalink &title=$entry.getTitle()"><img src="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/images/simpy-icon-16x16.png" border="0"/></a> <a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do ?href=$permalink &title=$entry.getTitle()">Simpify!</a>

You'll need to put the above snippet of HTML in the template for your blog post entries (e.g. asual-entry.vm)

WordPress Plugin for Simpy auto-submit

2005-08-24T01:25:45-04:00

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!

Search Simpy directly from Firefox, Part 2

2005-08-20T15:51:53-04:00

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.

To search your Simpy Notes, just follow the steps from the previous post, but instead of using LinkSearch.do?q=%s (see bookmark properties screenshot), use NoteSearch.do?q=%s. Of course, you should use a different keyword (again, look at the same screenshot).

Search Simpy directly from Firefox

2005-08-18T01:03:36-04:00

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.

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

Edit the Location field to make it look like the field in the above image.
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 ...)
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".

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

Enjoy!

WordPress Support for Posting to Simpy

2005-08-16T19:12:16-04:00

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 & 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.)