I've been thinking a lot about internationalization lately. If you watch the RSS feed, you'll see that nearly a quarter of the entries these days are in a language other than English. I added support for Right-To-Left languages recently, but I think it's time to look into translating the entire site into a few different languages.

After English, our most popular languages (among readers) are Turkish, French, German and Spanish. Yes, Turkish. Evidently we show up for searches on remote Turkish villages a lot. Among writers, I see a lot of Spanish, French and Dutch (and one high profile Italian at the moment). It would be nice to have Translate buttons on these posts. I'll have to look into Google's offerings in this area. It shouldn't be too hard.

I definately agree that we need a way for users to upload photos for the header. I'm getting tired of looking at the same thing all the time. And I'm kicking myself for making the photo resizer crop everything down to 800 pixels wide, so that I can't even use people's stuff if I want to. I'll have to get a tool up to upload and crop potential header photos.

Also in the Photo category, yeah, Next and Previous buttons are a definite must. And thumbnails along the bottom to make the photo viewer into a true slideshow would be a real improvement. Right now the photos are just not as far along as I want them to be.

Anyway, all the features that you (and everybody else) have been asking for are going into the Blogabond Bug Tracker. It's sad to say that I'm a bit swamped with other work at the moment, so it might be a while before I can do anything about some of this stuff. But keep telling me things you see that could use improvement. It's really helping the site to become more useful.

(Honest! You should have seen the place before people started suggesting things!)

Jason

written by  Jason Kester on April 14, 2007