Gerd’s Blog

Several weeks ago i posted about “Making JIRA a little more agile“. Today I found a Company called Green Pepper Software that has developed a product called Green Hopper which extends JIRA with stuff that is more common in the agile world than the list views the product provides out of the box.

They added an very intuitive Dash board for planing releases and a possibility to generate Burn down charts. In comparison with Mingle I have to say that i would prefer Green Hopper. Mingle is just an agile project management tool, JIRA was original invented as Bug Tracking Tool but can be extended with Green Hopper to an project management tool. The second advantage of JIRA is that there are thousands of other Plugins available and you have the possibility to write some of them on your own.

As web applications get used international the need to translate them into several languages gets bigger and bigger. Google describes in on of their last blog entries how proud they are to support 170+ Laguages for some of their applications. They even try to include the community to do translation on their own.

Everyone understands the need for translation of the services to provide the services to persons in their own language. The question is how to find out the right language for the current user. There are several ways:

1. Use the browser default Language
2. Let the user decide which language to use
3. Use the location of the request to choose a language

Google as many other services decided to use the third of the above options. Let me explain why i do not think that is an good idea.

I travel at least once a month to Hungary for a weekend because my girlfriend comes from there. Last week we spent several days there. I used the time to change my blog to WordPress as already described in my last posting. As i was playing araound with Blogger i noticed several of the following Screens:

Believe me i try to learn speak hungarian but the language is very difficult to learn so I understand not really very much of the information Blogger gave me. My browser is configured to use English (en) as my default language.

I can not understand why Google simple ignores the browser configuration and just guesses the language out of the location I surf from.

I am still on vacation so i used Thursday to move my blog as described in my last post. As already mentioned i preferred WordPress so i gave it try on www.wordpress.com one of the free hosted site. Already the first impressions where grate i played around a little bit and felt very comfortable with the interface and the functionality that was provided. So I started to search how i can transfer the old posting and comments. At http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpres i found an article how this can be done easily. WordPress supports an importer for several sources and Blogger is one of them. So i tried it an after a few minutes the content was transfered. I was very impressed how easy this part worked.

After i had finished the first import i tried to set up the http://blog.gerd-saurer.com domain to my hosted WordPress log. Unfortunately i could not register a CNAME entry so i decided to install my own WordPress instance on the server. After an hour everything was working and I searched and installed the most important Plugins (FeedBurner, Google Analyticator, …). Then began the most complicated part - finding an template that fits your needs. I found one but as so much of them it was optimized for 800×600 screens. I do not believe anyone is surfing with this solution any more so I changed it to an 1024×768. I hope you like the Theme.

No it was time to change all important tracking tools from the old to the new instance. First i changed my domain settings for blog.gerd-saurer.com at my provider. I created an new FeedBurner feed to track the old Blogger instance feed and changed the URL of the original post and comment feeds to the new WorPress instance. When this was finished i activated the Analytic settings and finally posted on my old blog my last message with an information that this will be the last message that is published on this blog and that everyone that receives this message via an RSS reader should update the feed URL.

Finally I tried to set up a mechanism to redirect people accessing my blog directly to the new one. You can find a nice HowTo at http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress.

It took me nearly one day to switch my whole blog. If it would have been possible to use the WordPress service hosted I think half a day would have bean enough. Everything was easy and straight forward. I hope the decision to move to WordPress was right.

Once again I apologies for the troubles the the moving had cause you but finally as you read this post you have switched successfully. I am looking forward for interesting posting and comments in the future.