Leave it to me and my strangely-named sites to test the globalization preparedness of a Web 2.0 site.<\/p>\n
Yes, I’m being difficult by giving my weblog a Japanese title with not a single attempt at Romanization, but my little bit of Asian text is enough to gauge whether site developers are even thinking that far ahead.<\/p>\n
The latest subject of this test is MyBlogLog<\/a>, to which Ryan introduced<\/a> me. It’s a fascinating idea — social networks for your blogs<\/em>. Of course, I signed up to be a member of The Transmission<\/a>, HawaiiUP<\/a> and HawaiiBlog<\/a>. And I added this site<\/a> and Musicwhore.org<\/a>, among others. (My profile<\/a>, in case your interested.) In using this site, I’ve run across some odd things that can get a bit annoying.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like most sites, your profile page changes depending upon your login state. People see one thing when you’re logged in, another when you’re logged out. MyBlogLog does a nice job of keeping the two states fairly consistent on a profile page, but it makes one big blunder — it doesn’t allow you to view easily the communities to which you’ve joined.<\/p>\n When you’re logged out, the profile page has a convenient link to all your communities, but it disappears<\/em> when you’re logged in. Instead, you’re shown people who joined communities to which you’ve subscribed. That’s not very useful.<\/p>\n It’s also fairly narrow in its support of RSS. The bottom corner of a profile page for a blog contains a number of links culled from the site’s feed. Now, I know I ought to have upgraded my feeds from RSS 1.0 to RSS 2.0, but I’ve been lazy. MyBlogLog found my RSS 1.0 feed, but it didn’t parse it.<\/p>\n My RSS 2.0 feed templates are a mess, so I edited them before I changed my blogs’ settings to point to it. In doing so, I found a weakness in Movable Type — MTBlogTimeZone<\/tt> isn’t formatted properly for RSS 2.0 — and a weakness in MyBlogLog.<\/p>\n According to the RSS 2.0 specification<\/a>, the guid<\/a><\/tt> element serves as a unique identifier for an RSS entry. It’s designed to accomodate any kind of identifier, and a URI is only one of many ways to set guid<\/tt>. It even has an attribute, isPermaLink<\/tt>, to indicate if the text node isn’t<\/em> a URI.<\/p>\n My RSS 2.0 feeds specified isPermaLink="false"<\/tt>, and they used a Movable Type unique identifier, not a URI. MyBlogLog didn’t care — it considered guid<\/tt>, not link<\/tt>, as the link to my site. I had to edit the template of each feed and change guid<\/tt> to match link<\/tt>. I didn’t change the isPermaLink<\/tt> attribute because I don’t<\/em> perceive guid<\/tt> doing the job of link<\/tt>. A feed reader shouldn’t perceive otherwise either.<\/p>\n As for globalization, the profile page<\/a> for \u300c\u4f5c\u8b5c\u300d can render the Japanese fine, but look at what happens you view the name on a subscriber’s page<\/a>. Editing my settings for my Japanese-titled sites also renders them in mojibake<\/a><\/em>. I had to change \u00e3\u20ac\u0152\u00e4\u00bd\u0153\u00e8\u00ad\u0153\u00e3\u20ac\u008d to \u300c\u4f5c\u8b5c\u300d to make sure the correct characters were saved.<\/p>\n I like the statistics tracking, and I like the idea of building a social community around sites that could already have social components. But it’s obvious MyBlogLog has much more work ahead of it.<\/p>\n [UPDATE, 11:59 p.m.] I refreshed my RSS 2.0 templates in Movable Type, and now all is well with the feed links. I’m not sure, though, whether that still mitigates the use of guid<\/tt> over link<\/tt>. I wish the Movable Type documentation site wasn’t so unnavigable — I would have discovered MtEntryDate<\/tt> supports RFC-822 as a format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, I’m being difficult by giving my weblog a Japanese title with not a single attempt at Romanization, but my little bit of Asian text is enough to gauge whether site developers are even thinking that far ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia-professional"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4Bkjq-mybuglog","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}