Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

Sky’s blog in Japanese

It turns out that it’s easy enough these days to have a blog “automatically” translated into a reasonable number of languages. I use WordPress software to support my blog, and there’s some real choice in terms of how to get your site translated.

The plug-in that fits my needs best was initially a bit rough around the edges — it didn’t work at all at first — but I tuned it over the course of a few hours, including some PHP finagling, and it works quite well now. It’s the Google-Translate plug-in by John Pozadzies. (I’ve sent a note to John with some suggested “fixes.”) The little flags in the banner at the top of this page can be clicked if you’d like to see how it works. If you only read English, make sure you come back here when you’re done experimenting!

But I also like the N2H (Nothing2Hide) plug-in and have it on my site, and I’ll say more about that later on. (more…)

Mashable is a good source of leads - on a bunch of topics related to online activity. Today they’ve put up a post that lists more than 40 “free blog hosting” sites.

I use WordPress and I run it on my own servers, as well as running it for a dozen or so clients. Gives me a lot of control, and more features than I would have if I used wordpress.com as a host.

But I get asked all of the time where one can find a good (and free) blog-hosting site.

So, Mashable has their 40+ answers to the question.

Found a good post on mashable.com that lists 50+ WordPress plug-ins that come in handy for site administrators. Go read it. Amazingly, I use a bunch of good plug-ins but I did not use even one of those recommended by Mashable. Some of them are a bit lame … the 404-checker sounds really good on the surface of it, though I haven’t figured out why a WordPress page would ever go 404 because they’re basically manufactured on-the-fly.

One that really does sound useful is the Instant-upgrade plug-in, that permits you to perform a WP upgrade automatically with a single click. WP upgrades generally take me around 5 minutes per site to perform and I do about 20 of them each time WP clicks over to the next version, so this could save me a couple of hours here and there! (It requires careful setup by a server admin, but looks like it probably does things correctly.)

If you got to my blog via a Google, Yahoo, or (Microsoft) Live search, then you’re actually in the minority, but these days that’s how zillions of people find absolutely everything when they’re online. It’s what I call the I-forgot-the-name-of-that-site-but-I‘ll-just-bring-up-Google-and-search strategy. Over the past couple of years, specialized search engines that are focused solely on blogs have risen in prominence — and the one I pay most attention to is Technorati. Google also “knows about” blogs and your blog “places higher” in Google searches if it has lots of connections from other blogs. But, there are other such blog-search nexuses as well.

Here’s what I want to point out. The conventional wisdom from 1995 to maybe 2003, was that a web site had to keep its visitors “on the site” and never give them a chance to leave. A visitor who went off to another site was equivalent to a lost sale. So web sites jealously guarded their links and seldom contained “offsite” links (those whose targets are outside the web site). The sites that did contain “links pages” (meaning pages of reciprocal links with other web sites) were primarily those of individuals — and search engines like Yahoo.

Now today, in the blogosphere, it’s become an accepted belief that people who search for information about “X” would be interested in reading about “X” no matter whose blog it’s in. So if you’ve searched for “Dalai Lama” and gotten to my blog, the assumption is that you’d like to read other blogs that mention the “Dalai Lama.” How is that accomplished? And is it even good for me, as a blog-writer, to facilitate your going off to read other blogs?

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