{"id":9473,"date":"2016-08-13T19:54:59","date_gmt":"2016-08-14T02:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=9473"},"modified":"2016-08-13T19:54:59","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T02:54:59","slug":"go-ahead-and-ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/go-ahead-and-ask\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Ahead and Ask &#8211; aka Language Support on podfeet.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/podfeet_in_Myanmar_language.png\" alt=\"Podfeet in Myanmar language\" title=\"podfeet_in_Myanmar_language.png\" border=\"0\" width=\"419\" height=\"201\" style=\"float:right;\" \/>I&#8217;ve mentioned a few times over the years that if there&#8217;s something new you wish I&#8217;d do on the show or something you wish I&#8217;d do differently, you should go ahead and ask.  I may not change things, and I may not do what you ask but if it&#8217;s easy or I think it&#8217;s cool enough, I will do it.  There&#8217;s zero harm in asking!  <\/p>\n<p>This week on the blog, Otoredi who I believe is from Malta, asked why my site has no language translation.  The post was short enough that it could have been spam (his\/her web link pointed to a Maltese Language School), but it got me thinking.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>You may not know this, but if you ever come across a website in a language you don&#8217;t understand, if you open the site up in Chrome it will automatically detect that it&#8217;s not  your language and offer to translate the site live.  I could have told Otoredi to just use Chrome, but I wondered how hard it would be to implement.<\/p>\n<p>One of the great things about having a blog on the WordPress platform is that there are plugins for <em>everything<\/em>.  I went to <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\" target=\"_blank\" >wordpress.org\/plugins<\/a> and did a search for language translation.  <\/p>\n<p>When picking a plugin you are looking for a few important things.  A lot of downloads, a reasonably high number of stars, and that&#8217;s it&#8217;s in active development, which you can tell by how recently it&#8217;s been updated.  On occasion you might pick one that&#8217;s only meets two of those criteria, but you&#8217;d lave to be <em>really<\/em> sure you needed it <em>and<\/em> it was the only way to get the job done.<\/p>\n<p>I found a plugin with 100K downloads, with very recent updates and 4.5 stars.  Sounded great. Installation of plugins in WordPress is wonderfully easy, I simply installed from within WordPress, and in the Settings panel I was able to choose the languages for which I wanted translation.  This was a little bit of a pain to click each language, but once I&#8217;d chosen a bunch and hit save, all podfeet.com pages had a bright orange button in the bottom right that said Translate. Tapping on that rewarded you with a tiny little flag for each language I&#8217;d chosen.  A bit hard to see the flags but looked pretty.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to write this up as a blog post, but when I followed the link from the plugin in my WordPress installation, I received a &#8220;Database Connection Error&#8221;.  I figured the author was just having a problem on their site.  I popped back over to wordpress.org and searched for it again&#8230;and it was gone.  Now this was getting weird.  I got that queasy feeling I was hoping to avoid by choosing a plugin with a ton of downloads an lots of positive ratings and recent updates.  I gave a shoutout to Bart and he came to the same conclusion I did, uninstall right away till I could figure out what was happening.  I uninstalled.<\/p>\n<p>I had the guy&#8217;s name, so I searched for him on Twitter, and he wasn&#8217;t there. Searched his company&#8217;s name, not there.  Searched Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus, all without finding him or his company.  I gave it a week and the site is still giving a database error so something definitely went belly up.<\/p>\n<p>The good news is that there&#8217;s always another plugin. I found Google Website Translator by <a href=\"http:\/\/prisna.net\" target=\"_blank\" >Prisna.net<\/a>.  Again it was a simple matter of pushing the install button in WordPress and I was in business.  This particular plugin worked a little bit differently, it allowed me to put what&#8217;s called a Widget into the right hand sidebar where you can simply choose your language from a list.  I could choose each language to show one by one, or I could have the full list, which is what I really wanted.  The list that you see is not as fun as the little flags but then again, it&#8217;s quite a bit easier to find your language!  There are some advanced features to this tool where I could add the flags, but I think I&#8217;ll stick to the plain pulldown with text for now.<\/p>\n<p>While this might not be something you personally need or care about on podfeet.com, the point of the story is that if there&#8217;s something you&#8217;d like to see on the site, or something you&#8217;d like me to talk about, please go ahead and ask!  I don&#8217;t guarantee by any means that I&#8217;ll do it, but why not ask? It might be easy, it might be fun, and I might just do it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve mentioned a few times over the years that if there&#8217;s something new you wish I&#8217;d do on the show or something you wish I&#8217;d do differently, you should go ahead and ask. I may not change things, and I may not do what you ask but if it&#8217;s easy or I think it&#8217;s cool [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[998,1000,999,216],"class_list":["post-9473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-language","tag-plugin","tag-translation","tag-wordpress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9475,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9473\/revisions\/9475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}