Random Monday - Automatically Translate Your Website into 13 Languages via Google Translate My Page

March 31st, 2008 * Comments(0)    

Just found this very useful Google Gadget Translate My Page to automatically translate English websites into any of the 13 available languages. Installing this widget on a non-English site usually gives you only one option to translate it into English, but it’s still better than nothing. Now you can attract a larger international audience to your wonderful blogs, especially for those written in English :D

This Google Gadget works on most sites except those that expressively forbid scripting - meaning self-hosted sites and blogs on Blogspot get to enjoy it while blogs on Wordpress.com don’t :(


© nothing2hide.net

Originally, I used the excellent Global Translator Wordpress widget (above)from nothing2hide.net which comes with cute little flags of all languages available for translation. Although Dreamhost offers a fantastic 500+ GB of bandwidth per month, it isn’t exactly that generous in terms of download speed and causes the flag images for the Global Translator plugin to not load on multiple occassions, so I finally gave up and made the switch to Translate My Page last week.

IMPORTANT: The Global Translator Wordpress plugin caches the translated pages which can be indexed by search engines, meaning visitors can find your site with non-English keywords. The Translate My Page widget doesn’t so that’s a important consideration if you’re thinking of making the same transition.

Get the script code for Translate My Page at the Google Translate site (top) or if you want additional customizability (widget size, border, default language, etc), visit its Google Gadget page (bottom). There’s more Google Gadgets to embed on your website over at iGoogle.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Mini Language Reference for Download Junkies
Learn 63 Languages with BYKI Lite
Southeast Asian Language Resources

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Random Monday : She Asked … How To Create a Favicon for Blogger

November 04th, 2007 * Comments(6)    

A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests :D

She asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here’s the steps if you’re interested in doing the same for your site.

Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we’ll use ICOs here.

Create a 16×16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor.

Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon.

After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon.

Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn’t allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you’ll end up displaying Google Pages’s favicon instead :D

Now you’ll need to login to Blogger and edit the Blogger XHTML template under Template > Edit Html. Remember to backup and save your template via Download my Template first!

Search for the <head> tag in your template and insert the following line after it:

<link rel=’shortcut icon’ href=’XXX‘ type=’image/x-icon’ />

where XXX will be the URL of your favicon. The edited template should look something like the screenshot below.

Save the template and it’s done! Internet Explorer users might need to clear their cache and/or restart Internet Explorer first.

Hooray!

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Blogger Backup Utility by Greg Duncan

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Time for a Break!

September 24th, 2007 * Comments(21)    

I have to settle something important in Real Life™ for the next three weeks and have therefore thought of three possible options and their consequences over the past weekend.

  • Work on the real life issues and update this site simultaneously.

    Articles written by skeletons make for some really dry reading :)
  • Work on the updating this site and neglect the real life issue.

    Yeah, I know my drawing is really bad but that’s definitely not a friendly shoulder massage

    Guess I really only have one option left which means this site will be updated once in a while for the next three weeks.

    Everything will return to normal on the 16 October 2007, meanwhile do feel free to peruse the archives or marvel at the works of some of my favourite artists or art, wallpapers and videos.

    Or visit some of my daily reads:

    1. HungryPrettyMonster - Foodie stuff (usually in Chinese)
    2. Brothers Brick - Lego eye kandi
    3. Rendered Beauty - More eye kandi
    4. JayIsGames - Flash and casual games
    5. The Random Gnome’s Random Lair - Indie, Retro and Tabletop Gaming
    6. The Meditation Chamber - Cars & Toys
    7. Ping.sg - Singaporean blog aggregator
    8. gHacks tech news - Techie stuff

    More quality links on the right sidebar :)

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    • Most Popular Posts for July 2007

    August 01st, 2007 * Comments(2)    

    Here’s the top three posts at The Download Munkey for this month:

    Top Cow Comics Wallpapers (The Darkness, Witchblade, etc)
    Index Astartes PDFs for Blood Angels & Flesh Tearers
    Long Range Shooting Demo

    After I made the decision to switch to Google Analytics last month for stat tracking, Google has to acquire Feedburner and offer the TotalStats feature in Feedburner for free :(

    Anyway, below are two reasons why I took out the Feedburner StandardStats tracking code after using Google Analytics.

    1. I can finally get an accurate overview of the most popular pages for the month instead of manually tabulating the stats.
    2. Google Analytics stats tracking server is definitely faster than the Feedburner server. Previously, this blog would sometimes stop loading when attempting to connect to the Feedburner servers.
    3. Google Analytics has more comprehensive statistics as well as the ability to view consolidated stats for any date range. Feedburner StandardStats could only view stats for a single day, the past week or for the current month. TotalStats should have this feature though.

    I still miss Feedburner StandardStats’s incoming stats page though - Google Analytics only shows the domain from which your visitors come from but not the actual page on that domain unlike Feedburner.

    MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
    Most Popular Posts for June 2007
    Most Popular Posts for May 2007
    Most Popular Posts for April 2007
    Most Popular Posts for March 2007
    Most Popular Posts for February 2007

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    A New Format - Themed Posts ;)

    June 24th, 2007 * Comments(2)    

    From today onwards, The Download Munkey will have only a single post per day (Consider additional posts as a little bonus ;p). I’m been spending too much time writing on things I’ve downloaded from the .NET that I have very little time to actually enjoy them :(

    The scope of this blog is also becoming over-diversified since I simply like too many different things on the .NET therefore I have decided to write themed posts for each day of the week. The plan currently goes like this:

    • Random Mondays - Anything goes for Random Monday. Software reviews or stuff like Warhammer 40,000 or anything I’m interested in ;)
    • Military/Firearms Tuesdays - Military hardware nad stuff like firearms - both real life or their depiction in media like games and movies
    • Wallpapers Wednesdays - Wallpapers from games and occassionally anime, comics and movies
    • Games Thursdays - Game videos, freeware/shareware game reviews and downloads.
    • Art Fridays - Cool artwork from talented illustrators. Papercraft stuff and other art-related stuff also goes here ;)

    No updates on weekends as usual ;)

    That’s the tentative plan as of now but since my stuff usually overlaps multiple categories, I’ll just see how things work out ;)

    And no, this isn’t a Random Monday post ;)

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