Interesting Stuff
It's time for another linkroll. I spent my time with reading some interesting stuff on the web recently, here is what I found worth sharing.
The first thing is Kaddi's new blog. She had her blog at blogger.com for a few months now, but wasn't entirely satisfied. Uploading images seems to be kind of a game of chance over there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The blogging software's feature set is kind of limited as well. Eg. it is not possible to create categories or tags.
I suggested to get her own domain and some webspace which is pretty cheap today. She did and installed Wordpress. I was really impressed by the software. I once had a look at version 1.2 but it has greatly improved in 2.0. Importing her old blogger entries was just a matter of clicks, the WYSIWIG editor is really good integrated and the whole management backend is very intuitive! If Wordpress had been that good a year ago this site would probably running it now.
For DokuWiki I had a look at how transliteration works. Basicly it means converting a language using non-ASCII letters to ASCII using a more or less phonetic transcription. Eg. the russian word “Правда” (Truth) becomes “Pravda” when transliterated. This seems to work for all languages which use some kind of limited character set (either alphabet style or at least some phonetic spelling). Ideally transliteration is even reversable. A function for simple oneway romanization will be included in DokuWiki's UTF-8 library. More links on this topic are available in my Scuttle bookmarks.
After my problems with ICQ yesterday I had a deeper look at what's possible with Jabber today. A really cool thing I found is an AJAX based Jabber client. I tried it on their page and really works fine (it even has sound if you need that). I haven't installed it my self yet because it needs some HTTP binding service at the used Jabber server and I'm not sure if my favourite provider supports this.
I'm also thinking about a step by step manual on how to switch from ICQ to jabber, to encourage my remaining ICQ contacts coming over from the dark side of instant messaging 