Posts

Showing posts from December, 2011

Browser Language

By Browser Language I do not mean the Browser User Interface Language. I am referring to the Browser Preferred Language for displaying Pages . I will use the acronym  BL  to mean B rowser preferred L anguage for displaying pages . An internationalised website will have pages in multiple languages. These pages can be displayed according to BL eg If BL is Korean then the website will send it's Korean pages to the browser. With most browsers, the BL can be set in the preferences and can be set independent of the language settings of the OS. Some browsers do inherit their BL from the OS language setting. This ability to change the BL has so much potential that few are aware of. Google are switched on to this potential. Google maps, if embedded correctly, will automatically adapt to BL. You can try it out for yourself. Visit lboro.ac.uk/about/findus.html  and you will see a Google map of Loughborough. Now change the BL in your browser preferences and refresh. You will see...

Microblog Space (character) Saving

Take the following example two lines of text: Fruit: apples, pears! Veg: cabbage, onions. Cars? Ford; Mini Fruit:apples,pears!Veg:cabbage,onions.Cars?Ford;Mini Line 1 has 60 characters and line 2 has 52 characters. I reduced the number of characters by using full-width punctuation characters. These full-width forms start at Unicode codepoint U+FF01. Using full-width forms I can dispense with the space character. So, for example, instead of colon + space I use full-width colon only. For microblog posts small space savings like this can be very useful. I could, and sometimes do, use OSX Character Viewer to obtain these full-width punctuation characters. When I am microblogging in English I toggle to the Simplified Pinyin Input Method to write the full-width punctuation. This may sound complicated and time consuming but with a little practice it is easy and quick and does not disrupt the flow of writing. There is one exception character. When I type full stop whilst in the OSX Simplif...

ZARA Website

Interesting! And the sort of thing I would do. ZARA 's website adapts the Social Media links displayed according to the Region. ZARA caters for multiple regions and for the majority displays a link to their Facebook facebook.com/Zara There are some regions for which it displays a link to that region's Social Media: China 中国: Zara's China landing page is  zara.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/home/cn/zh/zara-I2011  and the displayed Social Media link is Sina Wēibó 新浪微博 weibo.com/zarachina Russia Россия : Zara's Russia landing page is  zara.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/home/ru/ru/zara-I2011 and the displayed Social Media link is Vkontakte  ВКонтакте  vk.com/zara With their Japan landing page it appears that the intention is to link to a Zara twitter as indicated by the displayed text on zara.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/home/jp/ja/zara-jp-W2011  The link does not though resolve to a Zara Twitter or indeed any Twitter.