- The site is finally has gotten its first page rank from google: 2. Not bad considering no link campaign has been waged so far. Just imagine what's gonna happen after the link campaign
- Google adsense representative sent me an authorization to place customers' ads along with mine on the same page - huge relief, no need to create complex rules for preventing showing them together.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Two very small things - huge difference.
Two things:
Friday, February 17, 2006
Lots of small changes. Started working on lesson creators Adsense inclusions
Did a lot of small changes:
- Finished Russian translation of the properties file, now people from Russian will see the site in Russian
- Moved lots of java code to the JDK 1.5 generics - very useful things
- Multiple other changes, don't remember all of them already but there are lots of them
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Learn from Google
I read a nice article today from http://www.sitepronews.com/ called "The Dark Side Of Google A Reason For Concern?" and found the following quote about Google philosophy:
The Google philosophy:
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well
3. Fast is better than slow
4. Democracy on the web works
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer
6. You can make money without doing evil
7. There is always more information out there
8. The need for information crosses all borders
9. You can be serious without a suit
10. Great just isn't good enough
It something to learn from, isn't it? Unfortunately lately I have to focus too much on SEO techniques rather than inventing and programming new games for the site, introducing statistics module so that users could see the results of their games, making existing games more fun. A good reminder for me that the main goal of the site is to make it re-e-e-ally useful. Fortunately, it is becoming more useful but in another direction - more lessons are being added by people who found the idea behind Internet Polyglot interesting and having a great potential.
The Google philosophy:
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow
2. It's best to do one thing really, really well
3. Fast is better than slow
4. Democracy on the web works
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer
6. You can make money without doing evil
7. There is always more information out there
8. The need for information crosses all borders
9. You can be serious without a suit
10. Great just isn't good enough
It something to learn from, isn't it? Unfortunately lately I have to focus too much on SEO techniques rather than inventing and programming new games for the site, introducing statistics module so that users could see the results of their games, making existing games more fun. A good reminder for me that the main goal of the site is to make it re-e-e-ally useful. Fortunately, it is becoming more useful but in another direction - more lessons are being added by people who found the idea behind Internet Polyglot interesting and having a great potential.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Dutch lessons!
Baggeroli completed the iPolyglotDictionary file and I created 440 Dutch lessons from them! Go and take a look at them: http://www.internetpolyglot.com/lessons-nl-en
Welkom!
The Dutch language, from its beginning until today
Dutch is attested as a language as early as 500 AD, with the “split-up” that occurred among the Germanic tribal languages. What is known today as the “Old Dutch” is a period of around 600 years between 500 and 1200. The Old Dutch language was still very raw and thoroughly similar to the other West Germanic tribal languages, especially in its beginnings. Following this, is a period of time known as the “Middle Dutch”, which lasted from around 1200 to 1500. This is considered a buffer period for the Dutch language, since it was during these 300 years that the transition between Old Dutch and modern Dutch, which is in use nowadays.
Modern Dutch is heavily influenced by several other languages such as German, French or English. Greek and Latin also have their fair share of loanwords found in the Dutch vocabulary, which, by the way is one of the richest in the World, with almost 350.000 headwords.
Learning Dutch the easy way
Forget those old “Learn Dutch” courses that take you mindlessly through lessons without giving you a few examples to strengthen what you’ve learnt or improve vocabulary. Today’s language learning courses are all about interactivity and natural (instead of enforced) assimilation of new rules, words or expressions. Most of the free Dutch online lessons you can find on the Internet will be based on these two principles actually.
Learning Dutch is considered having roughly the same difficulty one would have learning German, not surprisingly, considering the fact that the two languages share some common roots down the path of history. So if you already know German for example, the same learning principles will apply when you’ll want to take up on learning Dutch.
The most important thing you need to do when you start learning Dutch is improve vocabulary. It’s crucial to start recognizing words and phrases before you start studying grammar or anything else. In order to memorize words faster and more efficiently, you could try out playing some vocabulary games. These games will offer you a fast vocabulary increase and not only help you memorize words, but they will help you memorize them in an efficient, long-lasting manner.
Facing the problems of studying the Dutch language
To many, learning to read and write Dutch is not that difficult but speaking is it near impossible. The pronunciation of words is sometimes completely different from how they are typed and the tonality also varies drastically. If you’ve never heard a native Dutchman talk, I’ll give you an example of what Tom Meyer, a Dutch radio commentator said about his own language: “Dutch isn’t a language; it’s a disease of the throat”.
Articles about Dutch in different languages:
The Dutch Language, From Its Beginning Until Today (in English)
La lengua holandesa, de su principio hasta hoy (in Spanish)
Langue hollandaise (in French)
Holländische Sprache (in German)
Lingua olandese (in Italian)
Nederlandse Taal (in Dutch)
Língua holandesa (in Portuguese)
Limba Olandeza, de la origini pana astazi (in Romanian)
Голландский язык – от истоков до наших дней (in Russian)
اللغة الهولندية، من بدايتها حتى اليوم (in Arabic)
Welkom!
The Dutch language, from its beginning until today
Dutch is attested as a language as early as 500 AD, with the “split-up” that occurred among the Germanic tribal languages. What is known today as the “Old Dutch” is a period of around 600 years between 500 and 1200. The Old Dutch language was still very raw and thoroughly similar to the other West Germanic tribal languages, especially in its beginnings. Following this, is a period of time known as the “Middle Dutch”, which lasted from around 1200 to 1500. This is considered a buffer period for the Dutch language, since it was during these 300 years that the transition between Old Dutch and modern Dutch, which is in use nowadays.
Modern Dutch is heavily influenced by several other languages such as German, French or English. Greek and Latin also have their fair share of loanwords found in the Dutch vocabulary, which, by the way is one of the richest in the World, with almost 350.000 headwords.
Learning Dutch the easy way
Forget those old “Learn Dutch” courses that take you mindlessly through lessons without giving you a few examples to strengthen what you’ve learnt or improve vocabulary. Today’s language learning courses are all about interactivity and natural (instead of enforced) assimilation of new rules, words or expressions. Most of the free Dutch online lessons you can find on the Internet will be based on these two principles actually.
Learning Dutch is considered having roughly the same difficulty one would have learning German, not surprisingly, considering the fact that the two languages share some common roots down the path of history. So if you already know German for example, the same learning principles will apply when you’ll want to take up on learning Dutch.
The most important thing you need to do when you start learning Dutch is improve vocabulary. It’s crucial to start recognizing words and phrases before you start studying grammar or anything else. In order to memorize words faster and more efficiently, you could try out playing some vocabulary games. These games will offer you a fast vocabulary increase and not only help you memorize words, but they will help you memorize them in an efficient, long-lasting manner.
Facing the problems of studying the Dutch language
To many, learning to read and write Dutch is not that difficult but speaking is it near impossible. The pronunciation of words is sometimes completely different from how they are typed and the tonality also varies drastically. If you’ve never heard a native Dutchman talk, I’ll give you an example of what Tom Meyer, a Dutch radio commentator said about his own language: “Dutch isn’t a language; it’s a disease of the throat”.
Articles about Dutch in different languages:
The Dutch Language, From Its Beginning Until Today (in English)
La lengua holandesa, de su principio hasta hoy (in Spanish)
Langue hollandaise (in French)
Holländische Sprache (in German)
Lingua olandese (in Italian)
Nederlandse Taal (in Dutch)
Língua holandesa (in Portuguese)
Limba Olandeza, de la origini pana astazi (in Romanian)
Голландский язык – от истоков до наших дней (in Russian)
اللغة الهولندية، من بدايتها حتى اليوم (in Arabic)
Internet Polyglot now speaks Russian
Not only there are Russian lessons now. No, the text and the menu and almost all content is in Russian now. Not for all, though but only for people who has their browser settings specifying Russian as the primary language for browsing.
Thanks to baggeroli (what could I do without you, man) - he pointed that some of the words he sees in Dutch.
That happened to be a great perk from AppFuse - it automatically deduces the browser language settings and places it as the locale for presenting content. What I effectively need to do is to have the properties files translated to different languages, and that's it!
So to enjoy InternetPolyglot in Russian do the following.
In Firefox: Tools -> Options -> Languages -> Add Russian and place it at the top of the list; press OK; go to http://www.InternetPolyglot.com
In Internet Explorer: Tools -> Internet Options -> Languages -> Add Russian and place it at the top of the list; press OK; go to http://www.InternetPolyglot.com
Добро пожаловать на Интернет Полиглот!!!
Thanks to baggeroli (what could I do without you, man) - he pointed that some of the words he sees in Dutch.
That happened to be a great perk from AppFuse - it automatically deduces the browser language settings and places it as the locale for presenting content. What I effectively need to do is to have the properties files translated to different languages, and that's it!
So to enjoy InternetPolyglot in Russian do the following.
In Firefox: Tools -> Options -> Languages -> Add Russian and place it at the top of the list; press OK; go to http://www.InternetPolyglot.com
In Internet Explorer: Tools -> Internet Options -> Languages -> Add Russian and place it at the top of the list; press OK; go to http://www.InternetPolyglot.com
Добро пожаловать на Интернет Полиглот!!!
Make the pages small for faster loading.
Huge thanks to baggeroli from http://www.hedir.com who spends so much time and energy in helping me to make Internet Polyglot a nice place for internet users to be.
This time he sent me some scaring numbers: my home page was weighting 165K!!! No surprise it was loading too long. The most of this load was javascript files totally unecessary for the home page. I removed some of those files, some of them I placed only on pages that need them (like wz_dragdrop.js or overlib.js) and the size of the page reduced to 40K. Besides, I put a "defer" directive to the javascript declaration so that some of js files are loaded only after the page is rendered.
It seems that now the page is loading much faster.
This time he sent me some scaring numbers: my home page was weighting 165K!!! No surprise it was loading too long. The most of this load was javascript files totally unecessary for the home page. I removed some of those files, some of them I placed only on pages that need them (like wz_dragdrop.js or overlib.js) and the size of the page reduced to 40K. Besides, I put a "defer" directive to the javascript declaration so that some of js files are loaded only after the page is rendered.
It seems that now the page is loading much faster.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Again about search engine optimized urls
There is a fine article that was recommended to me by baggeroli: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores - it talks about what to put in your urls: underscores or dashes. It seems I need to change the urls again from something like English_Spanish_Lessons.html to english-spanish-lessons.html
It's good that the site is still new and there are not much people have already created links to it's individual pages. So it seems that I have to change it ASAP.
It's good that the site is still new and there are not much people have already created links to it's individual pages. So it seems that I have to change it ASAP.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Finally! Google datacenter mystery resolved!
Press this: site:internetpolyglot.com and press that: site:internetpolyglot.com . Do you see the difference? At last it is explained what happens to the index of InternetPolyglot! So the reason of these two completely different results is the BigG using different data centers and one site can be indexed on one data center and not indexed on another.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Menu tweaking (less hits against the database)
Today I was optimizing the database access from the left menu: the menu is showing a list of languages and pairs of languages and it should change if a new lesson with a new language is added or lesson is deleted or lesson is shared or lesson is unshared or user loggs in or user loggs out. So you can imagine why it was hitting the database every time the page gets reloaded, even for static pages like Home of "Dictinary" articles.
What I did is placed a system of flags that force the database hit only in cases I described above but if nothing is changed then the menu is constructed from the http session. Of course this solution prones to less scalability if there is a huge number of people but for the begginning let's have it this way. In the future it's better to rely more on the database.
What I did is placed a system of flags that force the database hit only in cases I described above but if nothing is changed then the menu is constructed from the http session. Of course this solution prones to less scalability if there is a huge number of people but for the begginning let's have it this way. In the future it's better to rely more on the database.
Playing with more AdSense
I am trying to find a golden median between the amount of clicks on Internet Polyglot pages and people getting ticked off by too much advertisement.
As an experiment I put a small ad bar inside the lesson list, a bigger horizontal bar on the lesson detail page between "Back to lesson list" button and "Play lesson" links. Also I put a huge rectangle ad on the "Dictinary" articles. Let's see what's happens next. As the main goal of the site is to provide a quality free service to language learners, placing the ads should not compromise this idea and make browsing of the site unpleasant.
The main motto of Internet Polyglot: make site useful so that people return to it!
As an experiment I put a small ad bar inside the lesson list, a bigger horizontal bar on the lesson detail page between "Back to lesson list" button and "Play lesson" links. Also I put a huge rectangle ad on the "Dictinary" articles. Let's see what's happens next. As the main goal of the site is to provide a quality free service to language learners, placing the ads should not compromise this idea and make browsing of the site unpleasant.
The main motto of Internet Polyglot: make site useful so that people return to it!
People want dictinary
I don't understand what is all about these people: why are they so obsessed with finding a dictinary on the internet. There are so many places to find a fine dictionary!
Anyway, according to the large demand among language learners I enabled again the famous articles Dictinary or Dictionary and Grammer or Grammar. These articles about common misspellings in English are the begginnig of a greater series of articles and dedicated to the noble cause of hunting and stomping spelling errors in English.
Anyway, according to the large demand among language learners I enabled again the famous articles Dictinary or Dictionary and Grammer or Grammar. These articles about common misspellings in English are the begginnig of a greater series of articles and dedicated to the noble cause of hunting and stomping spelling errors in English.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Cleaning up html. Oh, I meant xhtml
I did validation of HTML and it shown lots of errors. Spent a couple of hours hunting for them and fixing them. Hopefully, it will make the pages more pleasing for search engines and google eventually will index all the pages.
Also I put the Google search box under the left menu. There it is more visible and also I added search option for the site itself. Well, when google shows my pages it will be useful, otherwise - not really.
Just finished the recalculation of the database of my company, 2:46 in the morning. Going home now. Night-night...
Also I put the Google search box under the left menu. There it is more visible and also I added search option for the site itself. Well, when google shows my pages it will be useful, otherwise - not really.
Just finished the recalculation of the database of my company, 2:46 in the morning. Going home now. Night-night...
Friday, February 03, 2006
Change of url for lesson lists. Working on titles
Yesterday I changed the lesson lists URLs from something like lessons-es-en (too cryptic, huh?) to this format: http://www.internetpolyglot.com/Spanish_English_Lessons.html . This trick should allow two things:
Next, and I hope last big major url change will be with lesson details. Currently the urls look like this: /lesson54 , where 54 is the lesson's ID. Not much of search engine optimization, is there? And not too user-friendly.
I plan to do something like this /English_Spanich_Lesson_Animals.html but for that I will have to introduce a new attribute for lessons which will serve as a main keyword for this lessons and simultaneoursly serve as a part of the url for further decoding into ID from two languages and the keyword.
It's going to be quite massive effort but has to be done anyway.
Today I am also working on making all urls to have title attribute. Will it help to saturate the pages with keywords. I guess so. I am afraid though that it can be oversaturating and interpreted as spam. And we are not spammers - we bring free foreign languges lessons for the world.
- Put keywords, i.e. language names in the url, search engines like it
- Make urls more memorizeable for users
Next, and I hope last big major url change will be with lesson details. Currently the urls look like this: /lesson54 , where 54 is the lesson's ID. Not much of search engine optimization, is there? And not too user-friendly.
I plan to do something like this /English_Spanich_Lesson_Animals.html but for that I will have to introduce a new attribute for lessons which will serve as a main keyword for this lessons and simultaneoursly serve as a part of the url for further decoding into ID from two languages and the keyword.
It's going to be quite massive effort but has to be done anyway.
Today I am also working on making all urls to have title attribute. Will it help to saturate the pages with keywords. I guess so. I am afraid though that it can be oversaturating and interpreted as spam. And we are not spammers - we bring free foreign languges lessons for the world.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Google index again and again. No time to work on InternetPolyglot
It looks like I can see now the Google pattern - site:internetpolyglot.com shows only one page in the daytime and closer to the nighttime it starts showing 308 pages. Interesting, huh?
My hypothesis is that Google sandbox is getting more and more sophisticated and has multiple levels. Currently my site is still in the box for the Western hemisphere (i.e. for US too) and is out of the box for the rest of the world. This way Google is caring more about the US end-users and tries new sites on others.
Is that true? Who knows...
I have almost no time currently to work on InternetPolyglot because we have a release at work.
My hypothesis is that Google sandbox is getting more and more sophisticated and has multiple levels. Currently my site is still in the box for the Western hemisphere (i.e. for US too) and is out of the box for the rest of the world. This way Google is caring more about the US end-users and tries new sites on others.
Is that true? Who knows...
I have almost no time currently to work on InternetPolyglot because we have a release at work.
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