Friday, October 13, 2006

What language/site do you want?

Did I mention that LibraryThing is now available in a host of languages? Did I mention that users did it all, and that I love you people to pieces and owe everyone a beer? Okay, I've mentioned this.

I'm starting to work the language-sites into the functionality. For starters, past users can decide to change their primary language from your profile (choose "edit profile"). This isn't actually the site you use--you can use whatever site you want, obviously. Rather, you're setting the language you usually use for reviews, tags, etc. I'm going to guess right now that you guys--a polyglot set--will want to list all the languages you can read. I'll provide that next. But can we live with one primary language for reveiws and tags and such? If not, the primary language will determine your default language, and I'll let you change it review-by-review. It you plan to switch languages in the middle of a review, you win, dammit.

What you say will be used so German users can opt to see just German reviews, French users French reviews, etc. Of course, you will ALWAYS be able to see the others too.

From now on, if you signed into a particular language site, your primary language was set to that by default. Germans are in the lead, incidentally. I suppose that was because I introduced the feature at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Which reminds me, I never blogged about that. I'll probably say more, but in brief I was dog-sick, with a voice like Joe Cocker, and the panel was in German, which I don't understand. It went something like this: "Blah blah blah web 2.0. Blah blah blah MySpace. Blah blah blah blah LibraryThing. Ho ho ho. Aber, what does the Growling Phlegm-Monster have to say?"

17 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've heard that you did some nice doodles though! ;-)

10/13/2006 3:25 AM  
Blogger Raphaela said...

What language do we want? Why, Latin, of course! Pretty please, could we have a Latin LibraryThing?

10/13/2006 3:50 AM  
Blogger Tim said...

Okay, Okay, I fold. Latin tomorrow. Yes, I took a bazillion years, but I am NOT contributing! :)

10/13/2006 4:08 AM  
Blogger Raphaela said...

Tim: Yay! Gratias maximas tibi ago!

Incidentally, the combo box to set your default language doesn't seem to show up in my browser (Firefox running on Win2k). Not a major issue for me, but I thought I'd report it.

Incidentally, it isn't only Google that's available in Latin. Wikipedia is too: http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagina_prima

10/13/2006 5:43 AM  
Blogger Convenção Bookcrossing said...

:)
I can't find the feature, though! it's supposed to be in the edit profile, right?

10/13/2006 6:27 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't see it, either. (At work - Windows XP Professional/Internet Explorer 6).

10/13/2006 9:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It might be a good idea to be able to pick a language by choosing its name in the proper language itself.

Thus, instead of listing e.g. :

Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Spanish

and so on, it 'd rather look as :

Deutsch
English
Español
français
Italiano
Nederlands

and so on.

One who doesn't know and recognise the name of a language as it is written in that very language, most probably doesn't know that language, either. On the other hand, should everybody speaking and wanting to use <pick any language> know and recognise its name in <pick any other language>?

10/13/2006 9:53 AM  
Blogger Tim said...

Feature now works for all. Sorry about that.

10/13/2006 12:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

One we don't need is nlnl.librarything.com

10/13/2006 1:55 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

I'm not getting nlnl.librarything.com, just nl.librarything.com. Where did you see it?

10/13/2006 5:47 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

It's official. By popular request, LibraryThing in Latin has launched. Of course, you gotta translate it :)

http://lat.librarything.com

I made the Lingua Latina group it's translation home. I suspect this will get philosophical quick.

10/13/2006 5:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just out of curiosity...

Are you planning to include other languages which do not use Latin-based letters in the future? I had in mind Hebrew, perhaps.

I have a feeling that Japanese might be a useful language to include as well. My grown son collects many books he orders directly from Japan (in Japanese) even though he cannot speak that language. My guess is that other Americans or English-speaker do so as well.

10/13/2006 6:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim, I just checked the
http://lat.librarything.com

It says "over sex million books on members' bookshelves". Is that just a front for porn? ;-)

10/13/2006 6:22 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Squeaky: We're looking at it, but we don't have good catalog support yet. We're working on it.

As for "sex million books," you should see what happens when we hit 30 million, in Latin!

10/13/2006 6:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

LOL! Should be interesting... :-)

10/13/2006 7:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry Tim. It was a poor joke. We don't want library thing in Double Dutch.

10/14/2006 10:04 AM  
Blogger Tim said...

Ringman: Sorry. I'm slow!

10/15/2006 4:24 PM  

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