Do you speaka my langwich?

It may seem like the entire Internet is in English or little rectangles, but it really isn't.

For those occasions when you're wanting to translate a few words or even a whole web page, there are free translation services available at Google, Altavista, Yahoo Babelfish, FreeTranslation and others.

Of course, this being me, I looked to see if there are Firefox extensions available to help with translation.

foxlingo seems to be a fairly feature-rich translation extension, which would probably come in handy if you need to do a lot of translation.

Then there's ImTranslator, which seems to be more aimed at those who need to write in different languages:

With ImTranslator you can enter multilingual text, check it for correctness, adjust unreadable messages, translate in different languages, look up words, print results and send email.

But all I wanted is something that allows me to select some text, and like my right-click and search functionality in Firefox, allow me to right-click and receive a translation. Preferably without having to leave the page I'm reading.

I found it: gTranslate allow you to select some words, right-click and get a translation using Google translation services directly in your context menu. It decides which language to translate from and to based on the page you're browsing and your locale. If it doesn't know what to choose, you can tell it the language pair to choose and then right-click again to see the translation.

Neat and easy.

So many bookmarks, so little time...

Up until recently, I had about 1600 Firefox bookmarks. I used them mainly for keeping up with my reading for sites where an RSS feed isn't suitable. I've been looking for the perfect bookmarks application for a long time (still haven't found it!) and finally settled on two online bookmarking services to replace my Firefox bookmarks completely.

After much testing of various services I settled on Google Bookmarks for my work/technology related bookmarks, and del.icio.us for my private bookmarks. I can't remember why I decided on these exactly (one of the reasons I now blog about these things), though multiple-tags per bookmark was one criterion, and which others I also tested (though Simpy was one of them), but this post isn't about that anyway.

This post is about searching my bookmarks.

Google Bookmarks isn't a terribly exciting thing, but they do allow one to search bookmarked sites for things - not just search the bookmark's details (url, title, comment etc), but the site it points to as well. (This confused me completely the first time I searched my bookmarks! I didn't know it did that!) This comes in handy if you know for a fact you bookmarked something but can't find it by searching the bookmark details.

But wait, you say, there's tags! Yes, but what if this is something you've only started tagging for recently and your older bookmarks weren't tagged for that concept?

So that's all great with my Google Bookmarks, but what about my private ones over at del.icio.us? That bookmarked-site search facility would come in even more handy for the bookmarks I have there. I was contemplating importing those bookmarks into a separate account at Google Bookmarks just for this feature - which would've been a pain, having to swap logins all the time - when I came across an article about the deliGoo Firefox extension.

This little extension installs a button in your Firefox Toolbar which, when clicked on, opens a new tab/window where you enter the username, tag (optional) and search-string you want to find. The first time you run this, it takes a while to build your search engine. The next search promises to be a lot quicker.

The results are returned, looking exactly like the results of a Google search (it's a Google Custom Search, after all). Note that if you're searching your own bookmarks, it will also search your private bookmarks (not just your public/shared ones). The results also include hits from any pages in the domain, not just the particular page of the site that you've bookmarked. Now, if only those results would contain my del.icio.us tags...

This would almost do away with any need to tag my bookmarks,  if I didn't have such a thing for them. (Ooh! Look! I just found a site amongst my older bookmarks to tag with my new tag!)

deliGoo is available both as a Firefox extension and an Internet Explorer add-on.

Posting to my blog

There has to be an easy way to post to my blog....I mean, without going to the web page - that's just so old-fashioned, after all. Sure, it's fine and all, especially since I can have the posting entry open in a tab all by itself...but, I want more!

So I download some software and extensions (naturally!).

The first extension (really just a bookmarklet) is the 'BlogThis!' bookmarklet you can get from the blogger site. It just pops up a little Firefox window in which I can write my post. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the 'Labels for this post:' field, which is no good - I need my tags! And also, I don't always want to post about the page I'm currently looking at. BlogThis! will insert the current tab title and a link to the current tab in its window, and you have to turn on html editing so you can remove the link...

I then downloaded and installed ScribeFire - yes, a Firefox extension. The nice thing with it is that it runs on Firefox and is therefore available to those who don't use Windows. And yay! It has the blogger tags available for me to use. Only...it's so hard to use! How do I add a post? I finally figured out that a right-click on the little icon it puts in the status bar will let me launch the little application in a new tab or window or browser...and the tabs on the right will allow me to add or delete blogs, tags, notes...but not posts. Clicking on a post will allow me to see my previous entries and edit them etc...but how do I add a new one. Puzzling. Perhaps I'm supposed to type over the top? So, I'm giving up on it and uninstalling.

I had already downloaded Windows Live Writer (WLW), back when I was looking into blogs for a different purpose altogether. Very nice application, and there's a Firefox extension for it (of course!) which works similarly to the BlogThis! bookmarklet, in that it opens a window for that application with title and link already included. Alas and alack! No labels! I mean, yeah, it has the Technorati tags and a few others that you can include, but I want the blogger labels feature so I can search my blog by labels later.

Another good thing about WLW is that you can retrieve all your blog entries that you have published, and store them on your PC. This is a very nice feature. Of course it works the other way too: whatever you post using WLW is stored on your PC in the first place. Hmmm. Even this entry which is still in draft form, is retrieved by WLW (albeit incomplete, since I'm still writing it!).

WLW also lets you install plug-ins. I installed the Picasa link (because that's where blogger stores any pictures I upload to the blog), and am looking at the tag/label situation...because I do like this application. Though the MS help is as useful as ever: i.e. not at all.

Ah! Looky-here! WLW has a new version. YAY! With Blogger Labels (tag) support! Download, install - hah! It wants to make Windows Live Search the default! Not. And it wants to install Mail and Photo Gallery. No, I'm quite happy with Picasa, thanks. Though I don't get a chance to refuse Messenger, the Toolbar and the Sign-in Assistant (whatever that may be). It takes a while, but whether this is because of the download speed or because it's so big, I don't know.

So after much investigation i.e. googling, it turns out the labels were there all along. I just didn't know that the categories at the bottom of the screen were my blogger labels. And the way the application was positioned on my screen, I couldn't see it anyway. Luckily someone spelt it out on their blog:

So now I have a pretty new version of Messenger (which I will need to get a hack for ASAP to kill the advertising) and the new version of WLW. Doesn't hurt, I guess.

Now to uninstall all that other rubbish...
ETA: WLW will also work happily with Live spaces blog, Livejournal and others.

Reading, reading, reading

Where do I find all these goodies, you may very well ask. That depends on whether I'm looking for something specific, or just happen to come across it.

The 'unsearched' for ones, I find by reading my RSS feeds in Google Reader....which I found at some stage looking for something in particular, no doubt.

So what's Google Reader all about? If you have a google account, you can subscribe to RSS feeds from anywhere and read them all at Google Reader. It's free. And being online, it doesn't matter which computer you log in at, you will see which entries you haven't read yet. Lovely.

I use Firefox, so the first thing I did after starting to use Google Reader was find a shiny extension to use in conjunction with it. The one I use is Google Reader Notifier. It puts a little icon in the Firefox status bar, telling you how many unread items you have, by label even. It checks every few minutes (configurable) to see how many articles are awaiting your reading pleasure. Clicking on its icon will open Google Reader in a new unfocused tab (though you can change this setting).

Google Reader in all its glory:

Google Reader has recently gotten a search function, which is the ant's pants. In addition to the tech-y blogs, I subscribe to several food blogs here in Singapore (which I have given the same label to), and now I can search just those blogs for a location or a restaurant name before I go out to feed my face. So, so good.

And since subscribing to the local newspaper's RSS feed, I'm never without something to read....well, skim over ;-).

Oh yeah: don't do what I did and tell it to default to Google Reader, when you get asked how you want to subscribe to the feed. You get weird things happen if you do a search and try to click on a page containing a feed. Not good.

(If you want to read this at LiveJournal)