Michal Čihař - Archive for 11/2012

Tomorrow (Thursday 15th November), there will be a PGP key signing and CAcert assurance party in Prague. It will be held in SUSE offices and it will start at 17:00.

If you are interesting in having your PGP key signed, bring papers with your key fingerprint (you can use for example these slips) and some government issued ID. For CAcert assurance it is recommended to bring printed out assurance papers (you can get them from CAcert website) and of course IDs as well.

You can find more information on Facebook or Google+ event pages.

Weblate is close to 1.3 release (should happen on Friday if nothing urgent appears) and it's quite last chance for translators to catch up.

Weblate is of course translated using Weblate, but you can of course also translate Gettext po files directly and either upload them into Weblate or use Github issue tracker for that.

If you don't know Weblate yet, it is web based tool for translating with Git integration. You can also call it crowdsourcing platform if you wish :-).

As I've already written before, phpMyAdmin is getting new documentation. The basic conversion has been already done and merged, but there are always things to improve.

Right now I'm spending my free time on improving that and pushing the documentation forward. But hey, you can help in this area as well - just look at it on http://docs.phpmyadmin.net/ and in case you see any problems, fix them or at least report them.

The easiest way to contribute a fix is to use online editor Github provides. Just navigate to the documentation sources, choose appropriate file, click on edit (what automatically forks the project for you) and once you're satisfied with your changes, open a pull request.

In case this still looks too hard for you, just open a bug report or write us on mailing list or IRC.

And you can of course also contribute to documentation translations, which did unfortunately suffer quite a lot from the documentation conversion.

I was quite unhappy with shape of our documentation for some time, but this week I finally found some time to dig deeper into conversion into something more usable.

Nowadays I'm mostly using Sphinx for writing documentation, which allows to easily write using RST and provides output to various formats. Together with Read the Docs service, it makes great combo for providing user documentation, which I use for example for Weblate.

So with a little bit of magic in Python and Beautiful Soup I was able to convert most of the HTML documentation into RST without tons of manual work. The resulting source (and ugly conversion script) temporarily lives on my github and generated documentation is available on Read the Docs.

There are of course still many things to improve, but I think even right now it is easier to navigate than previous monolithic HTML file.

Now we need to decide if and how to integrate this into official repositories and I can then continue on improving the documentation content.

While working on tool for online translating, I should have probably expected this, but somehow it surprised me - Weblate should support RTL languages.

This issue was brought to me today by Yaron Shahrabani (Hebrew translator of Wine) and I simply had to look at this quite unexplored area for me. Fortunately it seems to be pretty easy, just matter of adding few html attributes to right places.

I've quickly adjusted the code (the hardest thing was to get list of RTL languages) and Weblate should now properly support RTL languages on both sides - as an user interface language and as a translated language.

In case you understand any of Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Urdu or other RTL language, I'd really like to hear from you if Weblate shows them correctly.

Since Google introduced support for "Rich snippets", I wanted to play with that technology a bit. I've already used microformats in the past, but today's preferred solution seems to be microdata, which plays nicely with HTML 5.

To have some real data to show, I've chosen spolecneaktivity.cz, a community site for free time activities (sorry it is Czech only). It provides me XML export of some data to play with.

After a little bit of hacking, I wrote a Python script to parse that and output HTML with all microdata details I've found in original XML. The output now lives at http://cihar.com/aktivity/ and Google's Structured Data Testing Tool seems to parse this just fine.

The only question is whether it will show up in the results sometimes as it warns "urls are pointing to a different domain than the base url".

As Weblate release is getting closer, I've decided to give new version more testing in real life and it got deployed at http://l10n.cihar.com/.

This release brings quite a lot of new features, most interesting for users might be:

• Better and new consistency checking.
• Better support for Android resources.
• More visible data exports.
• New buttons to enter some special characters.
• Support for exporting dictionary.
• Checks for source strings and support for source strings review.
• Support for user comments for both translations and source strings.
• Better changes log tracking.
• Changes can now be monitored using RSS.

You can see full list of changes in our documentation.

As usual, I hope this upgrade will go smoothly and won't cause any big problems :-).

Yesterday I've completed last big feature I wanted to have for Weblate 1.3 - improved changes tracking and exporting this as RSS feed.

You can find example of this feature on data exports page on demo server, it is also covered in the documentation. I think there is not much to describe here, these are simple RSS feeds which will contain all important things happening to translation.

This being last major feature, we're now aiming at stabilization and bug fixes. I expect this phase will take two weeks where I plan to deploy new version to http://l10n.cihar.com/ (probably next week).

If you can help with testing, you're welcome to help and report bugs.

Weblate 1.3 will bring several new features. One of recently implemented parts is source strings review.

Translators quite often find some problems with original string. Be it typo, wrong wording or simply the message is hard to understand. In Weblate 1.3 they will have an option to push feedback to developers. The feedback is stored within Weblate and optionally can be sent to configured email.

In addition to this, there are now checks for source strings as well, which might help you to improve quality of them. New checks are of course covered in the documentation.

You can already try current Weblate on http://demo.weblate.org/, though there are still some things which need polishing.