Gallery

Lost in translation

Posted on 24 Oct 2005 at 16:05

Paul Ockenden looks at multilingual requirements for global websites, while Mark Newton continues his server move to Canary Wharf

We're all going on a Summer Holiday

This has been a busy month, with the usual rush of clients suddenly realising that a pile of jobs has to be done before they go away on holiday, only to find that the people who need to approve the work are on holiday themselves (and when they come back, someone else will be away, and so it goes). In many ways, the European idea of shutting down for all of August may have its benefits.

Moving the servers to London (www.interhouse.net) meant that the old machine room needed rewiring and tidying up - some had been muttering that it looked like an Electronic Equipment Disposal Facility for quite a while, but they didn't understand the kind of 'creative' environment modern web developers prefer. Mark enrolled the services of one of his sons, Oliver, to help rearrange the machine room, and things are starting to improve, with clear desktops spotted on several occasions.

After all this moving, the time came to update the main development web server to mirror the live servers a bit more closely, which meant installing Windows 2003 and .NET 1.1. In the past, all the ASP.NET development had been done on a separate server, but in the interests of keeping things simple it would be better if the main development server was of this configuration. It's at this point that things ground to a halt, because after two weeks of trying different configurations Mark is still unable to connect to the development web server via Visual Studio, which has made it impossible to create new projects. Judging by the various forums, Mark isn't alone in having such problems - it appears that the order of installation can be one of the issues, but there are no pointers available as to what the correct order is, and the Microsoft support sites are unusually unhelpful on this matter. A search for the requisite error messages, which usually brings up an answer, doesn't work in this case. Mark hasn't given up yet and will be reporting back as soon as someone slips him a Valium and prises the hammer from beneath his clenched white knuckles.

Bowled a Googley

Now for a cautionary tale for those of you who work with a group of colleagues, all of whom access the Internet from behind a proxy. A good friend of Mark's was experimenting with the Google API - his application was querying Google to extract data - but unknown to him at the time there's a limit on the number of requests that can be posted within a set time from a single IP address. This is quite a reasonable restriction when you think about it, to control the massive demand on Google's servers. His testing went well until he decided to run code continuously from a script, whereupon he started to receive error messages from Google saying that he'd exceeded the maximum number of permitted requests. That was fair enough, but things got worse when his other work colleagues started getting the same message on their screens. What was happening was that, since the whole department was connected through the same proxy server, all these users were connecting with the same IP address so Google locked them all out. How to make yourself popular with your work colleagues with a few lines of script.

Room At The Top?

We're often asked how to optimise a website for the search engines - clients quite reasonably want their website near the top of the searches. Our stock answer to this is 'sure, it will be near the top, along with all the other websites that want to be top'. In truth, there's now no sure-fire way of getting to the top of all the search engines for all likely queries. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Actinic, the 'shop-in-a-box' company, is now offering a course on how to optimise your website for search engines, as well as giving ideas on online marketing. This course is particularly useful even if your site doesn't use Actinic products, and at only £250 it's certainly value for money. Places are limited, so you do need to book early. If your thirst for knowledge knows no bounds, you might also consider a copy of Selling successfully online, written by the CEO and the Marketing Managers of Actinic, which is available from www.actinic.co.uk for £5.99. It's a great source of tips for the beginner, and even us 'old hands' can probably learn from it.