wordpress Archives - Stay N Alive

Looking for a Facebook Internationalization WordPress Plugin

The Coat of Arms of Indonesia is called Garuda...
Image via Wikipedia

As I’m writing my book, I’ve come to realize that a good portion of you that visit here speak another language.  In fact, Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Facebook’s 2nd largest market (Indonesia, with over 200 million population), just so happens to have a high ranking in the readers of this blog as well, at least amongst those of you who are Facebook users.

There’s a little known fact about me that you may not know – I lived 3 years as a child in Indonesia, and, while I have forgotten much of my Bahasa Indonesia (as a kid, I could speak somewhat fluently), I do pick up some here and there and I thoroughly understand Indonesia’s culture and would love to have more of you Indonesian readers and visitors have a more comfortable experience on StayNAlive.com.  I’ve wondered if it might be worth sending each blog post through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, pick a few of the top languages visiting here (including Bahasa Indonesia), and see if I might be able to have multiple versions, in multiple languages integrated into this blog’s design.  Then I had a better thought – Facebook has its own crowd-source Translation product, Facebook Internationalization.  What if I just used that, and allowed you, my readers to translate this blog for your peers and the translation could happen in any language, natively.  There’s one problem though – there’s not currently any WordPress plugins that do this yet.

So I’m giving the idea away for free.  Facebook has a whole slew of documentation on how to integrate Facebook Translations into a website.  I’ll also be including a chapter about how to do this in my book, which I have to focus on at the moment.  Because of this, I don’t have the time to write one myself, but I’d love it if anyone felt compelled to build a Facebook Internationalization plugin for WordPress that others could use.  If you write one, let me know, let me provide feedback, and I’ll integrate it into the design of this blog and give you as much attention as you need to promote the plugin.  If you know of such a plugin, let me know!

Auto-load on scroll plugin?

I have one other request.  I think it’s a waste of time to have to click to the bottom of a blog and click again to go through past posts from that blog.  I want my blog to work like Twitter.com, where if I scroll down, it keeps scrolling, auto-loading additional content the further I scroll.  Is there such a plugin?  If not, why not?  That’s another plugin I’d promote heavily were it to become available.

If no one jumps to the cause, I may just build these myself when I get some time, but I thought I’d throw it out there in case someone wants a fun project to work on.  I think they’re both pretty forward-looking plugins that would see a lot of use.

Prologue – OpenSocial for Twitter

Just today, Matt Mullenweg, founding developer and owner of Automattic, announced a new, open source, theme for WordPress called Prologue. The theme essentially turns your blog into a “mini-Twitter”, with a “Whatcha up to?” text box at the top where your users can post what they are currently doing. This is an excellent way to build community on a site, just for your own users – it will be interesting, as cell phone networks open up, to see if there will be ways to integrate “mini-communities” such as this onto users’ cell phones. I also anticipate someone writing some sort of Twitter plugin that integrates with this theme, and I’d love to figure out a way to use this theme in conjunction with my current theme so I can add this as a link to my current blog.

The theme has been released as Open Source, completely free, under the GPL. The release of this reminds me very much of Google’s OpenSocial initiative, of which they are releasing platform code, very similar to the way Facebook’s platform works (Facebook is a very closed platform currently), for anyone and everyone to load onto their own blogs as they wish. Basically, you can “create your own Twitter” with this code they are releasing!

Joseph Scott, a very good friend of mine, was one of the writers of this and he’s going to give me a demo this Thursday – I’ll post a video of it when I’m done (unless someone wants to buy me an N95, which I’ll post live via Qik.com!). Matt Mullenweg will also be in town this Saturday and meeting with local bloggers and social media advocates – if I can make it work, I may try some video of that as well.