Tag: Wanted

Google Questions [en]

[fr] Comment Google détermine-t-il (1) le pays d'où provient un site et (2) la langue d'une page? Pourquoi les résultats d'une recherche en français sont-ils différents, selon qu'on utilise google.ch ou google.fr?

So, I’m writing up a document for a client about search engine placement. Not really an SEO thing, more a “good search engine placement results from popularity and success, not the opposite” thing. Like, (gosh, am I being eloquent right now,) setting objectives like “be in the first three results for this or that keyword combination is not very realistic.”

Anyway, I’m stuck in the part about limiting seach to one country or a language (which is a “big thing” if you live outside Anglophonia and ambition to reach the local population). I realise that the way Google manages these different searches is not quite clear to me.

Location

If you go to google.ch you can choose to do a search for “pages from Switzerland” (I’m using my name as a search term example). Or with google.fr, “pages from France” (language set to English both times so you can compare). My assumption (thanks shastry) is that they use server location for that. But is that all? (My server is in the US, so that explains why CTTS does not show up as a “Swiss” site.)

Language

If I select French as the search language, I get different results whether I use google.ch or google.fr. I assume Google uses language detection — but why are the results different?

Thanks for any explanation which can help me see a bit more clearly.

Events in WordPress [en]

[fr] Prise de tête pour trouver un moyen d'utiliser WordPress pour afficher des événements (des billets spéciaux, mais pour lesquels on précise aussi une date de début et de fin d'événement). Il faudrait qu'on puisse afficher les "événements encore pas terminés" sur une page spéciale.

Deux plugins m'offrent des solutions partielles, mais je suis incapable de les transformer en solutions totales. Toute aide serait bienvenue.

Besides using WordPress as a blogging tool, a client of mine would like to use it to display a page of upcoming events. I’ve dug out a number of plugins which somewhat do the job, but getting things to work exactly as we want is proving to be a pain in the neck.

As I’ve been stuck on this for a few weeks now and still see no light, I’m offering this problem to the collective mind out there in hope that a bright solution pops up somewhere before we go live (which is… very soon — hear my desperate plea for help).

Here’s what we want

  • events should be posts (this rules out Shrikee’s Events Plugin)
  • events have a start date, and an end date — time is unnecessary (this rules out RS Event)
  • events should show up in the normal flow of posts and on their own category page (we don’t want them on the home page, but I can exclude the category manually, so that’s a non-issue)
  • we should be able to display upcoming events on a WordPress page (I’ll stick whatever code is needed in the template for that page) — “upcoming”, here, meaning events whose end date is not yet past.

Partial solutions

At first, I thought about using upcoming or eventful, but for quite a few reasons this won’t work out in our situation.

Event Calendar seemed like a good candidate, although we didn’t really need the “calendar” itself. I hacked the layout of the event posts so they displayed OK. However, the main bit is missing. Event Calendar provides a way to list all the events “after today”, by calling http://blog.address/?ec3_after=today for example. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on our setup (probably something we did to the rather hacked theme. I’ve had a look at the source code but couldn’t really figure out what happened when that variable was passed, so was unable to reproduce anything ressembling it in a Page template.

Another problem is that this will not show events which have started yesterday but which are not yet over, if I’m not mistaken.

Last but not least, we have two event subcategories, so I’d have to create two (or even three) separate event pages — but I guess that if I manage to make one, filtering posts by category shouldn’t be too hard.

Another solution would be to use Posts Expire and Posts Begin as described in this forum post I stumbled upon yesterday. Again, these plugins provide a way to call “posts which have not yet expired” with a particular URL: home/?orderby=post_end_date. Again, I haven’t manage to dig out the code and stick it in a Page template — trying to rewrite a pretty URL to that one is source of much hair-tearing upon this server I have very little control on, and I haven’t found a way to make it work.

The other problem I’d have to work around if using these plugins is that expired posts are not displayed in the blog anymore. I’m not sure what code in the plugin takes care of that, but it would have to be commented out.

Help

So, I have two partial solutions here, but I’m stuck making progress on either. Do you have any ideas which could help me out — either to make one of my partial solutions a working one or to find a third one?

I’d really really appreciate help on this one. Thanks a lot.

LIFT'07 Social Networking Map Experiment [en]

[fr] Si vous étiez à LIFT'07, remplissez le questionnaire pour l'expérience de Social Networking Mapping!

I can only encourage you to participate in the LIFT’07 Social Networking Map Experiment if you attended the conference. It takes a little while to complete, depending on how extroverted you are, I guess. And if you hang out with evil supernodes, too.

Listing the people I knew before the conference wasn’t too hard, though of course I had to plough through the list. Here are the names I came up with:

Henriette Weber Andersen, Jean-Christophe Anex, Bieler Batiste, Yoan Blanc, Florent Bondoux, Stowe Boyd, Raphaël Briner, Stefana Broadbent, Lee Bryant, Marie Laure Burgener, Riccardo Cambiassi, Jérôme Chevillat, Marco Chong, Matthew Colebourne, Samuel Crausaz, Thierry Crouzet, Pedro Custodio, Nicolas Dengler, Jens-Christian Fischer, Antonio Fontes, David Galipeau, Bruno Giussani, Tanguy Griffon, Matthias Gutfeldt, Laurent Haug, Peter Hogenkamp, Dannie Jost, Christophe Lemoine, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Yann Mauchamp, Geneviève Morand, Philippe Mottaz, Hugo Neves da Silva, Nicolas Nova, Bjoern Ognibeni, Roberto Ortelli, Jean-Olivier PAIN, Marc-Olivier Peyer, Bernard Rappaz, Andre Ribeirinho, Martin Roell, Pascal Rossini, Robert Scoble, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, Joshua Sierles, Nicole Simon, John Staehli, Elisabeth Stoudmann, Sandrine Szabo, Olivier Tripet, Guido Van nispen, Benjamin Voigt, Alfonso Von Wunschheim, Ellen Wallace, Bertrand Waridel, Mark Wubben, Chris Zumbrunn, Jan Zuppinger

“New people” I met at the conference was more difficult, firstly because I didn’t get the names of everyone and business cards are only so helpful, particularly when you don’t have any for the people you talked to, and secondly because many people did not include a photo in their profile on the site, or any information about themselves. Here’s the list I managed to compile:

Jeremy Allen, Paula do O Barreto, Nuno Barreto, Brian Cox, Florian Egger, Ramon Guiu Hernandez, Noel Hidalgo, Lisette Hoogstrate, Tom Klinkowstein, Trine-Maria Kristensen, Maya Lotan, Gia Milinovich, Glenn O’neil, Nortey Omaboe, Michele Perras, Ivan Pope, Derek Powazek, Thomas Purves, Dieter Rappold, Colin Schlueter, Maryam Scoble, Sebina Sivac-Bryant, Jewel THOMAS, David Touvet, Remo Uherek, Sarah Wade Hutman

A much smaller list, as you can see. Well, as I knew quite a lot of people to start with, I guess it’s expected to be short — but I’m sure this is at most the two-thirds of the people I met. If we talked and you’re not listed, let me know!

One methodological problem I can see with the survey is that “already knew” and “met for the first time” are not clearly defined. I’ve taken a really wide interpretation of those expressions for this survey. I’m not sure absolutely everyone on my first list would consider they “know” me. Or if I haven’t met a person yet but we’ve got common friends and I’ve followed a lot about them, do I “know” them? Ditto for “met for the first time”. I’d interacted with Gia online after LIFT’06, but this is the first time we talked offline, for example.

Anyway… interested in seeing what will come out of this. Please take the survey!

Three-Bedroom Flat to Sublet (Lausanne) [en]

[fr] Un ami cherche à sous-louer son appartement meublé à Lausanne, dès mars 2007, jusqu'à une année (flexible). C'est un trois-pièces avec vue, à environ 10 minutes du centre en bus.

Si vous voulez des informations supplémentaires, contactez-moi et je vous donnerai les détails.

Update: flat has found a taker, not available anymore.

A friend of mine is looking for somebody to sublet his furnished flat to, starting March 2007, for upto a year (some flexibility there). It’s a very nice three-bedroom flat with a view, about 10 minutes by bus to the centre of Lausanne.

If you’d like any extra info, get in touch with me (e-mail, phone, twitter, IM… you choose) and I’ll give you the details.

PointBlog: ça traîne en longueur, et Ginisty aux abonnés absents [fr]

[en] If ever you're in France, at the Festival de Romans, and you bump into Christophe Ginisty, would you do me a favour and remind him that his company (Pointblog SàRL) still owes me money for an article I wrote roughly a year ago. Thanks in advance!

Il y a un an de cela, Cyril Fiévet me contactait pour savoir si j’étais toujours intéressée à contribuer au magazine Netizen, produit par la société Pointblog SàRL.

J’ai accepté avec plaisir, j’ai passé deux bonnes journées à suer sur mon clavier (littéralement, j’avais un crève du diable et une fièvre du tonnerre), et le résultat a été publié dans le numéro 2 de Netizen.

Restait à me faire payer (parce que oui, la gloire et tout c’est bien joli, mais c’est encore mieux quand ça permet de payer un peu le loyer et les croquettes du chat). D’abord, mea culpa, j’ai tardé — car je n’avais pas réalisé que Cyril m’avait envoyé par mail des choses à imprimer, remplir, signer, renvoyer, etc.

En juin (je crois, faudrait que je re-fouille dans mes mails pour être sûre), donc, motivée en partie par le lavage de linge sale qui a fait un peu le tour de la blogobille à l’époque, j’envoie un timide e-mail au rédac’ chef du défunt hibernant méditant magazine, histoire de savoir si j’ai une chance de voir un jour la couleur de ces euros durement gagnés.

Un forward ou deux plus tard, aussi bien Gilles Klein que Christophe Ginisty, qui dirige la société Pointblog, réagissent par mail pour me demander des détails pour qu’on puisse régler l’histoire. Très bien, donc.

C’est là que j’ai réalisé que je n’avais pas encore renvoyé les papiers. Je l’ai donc fait et j’en ai informé Christophe Ginisty par e-mail.

Puis, j’ai attendu.

Vous connaissez la chanson?

“J’ai attendu attendu elle n’est jamais venue…. daï daï daï daï tagada tsoin tsoin… daï daï daï daï…”

J’attends toujours.

Faut dire qu’entre-temps, j’ai quand même relancé Christophe une ou deux fois par mail, puis par courrier recommandé-signature-etc. (vous vous souvenez peut-être…). Ai aussi tenté de l’ajouter sur Skype (même si je suis une timide du combiné, avec Skype je m’en sors à peu près), mais sans résultat. Si je ne savais pas mieux, je me demanderais s’il n’était pas par hasard mouru.

Donc, chers amis lecteurs, si jamais vous allez au Festival de Romans et que vous y croisez Christophe Ginisty, vous voudriez bien lui rappeler que sa société me doit encore des sous, siouplaît, et qu’il doit y avoir dans une pile quelque part mails et courriers de ma part à ce sujet?

Basic Bilingual and Bunny's Technorati Tags Plugins Updated for WordPress 2.1 [en]

[fr] Mise à jour de mes deux plugins pour WP2.1 qui les cassait gravement. Mises à jour pas testées, à manier avec précaution.

Thanks to Sudar, who took the trouble to fix Bunny’s Technorati Tags so that it worked with WP2.1, here are up-to-date version of these two plugins, Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Basic Bilingual:

The previous, WordPress 2.0-compatible versions are still available:

Warning: these old versions suffer from the empties custom fields problem. Don’t use them with 2.1.

Disclaimer: I’m swamped with work, haven’t upgraded yet, and haven’t tested the new versions of the plugins. Use carefully. Let me know if there are glitches. Bunny’s Technorati Tags is the very version Sudar put online (I’m making it available here mainly as there are links to it out there beyond my control, not the least from the wp-plugins.org wiki which has been closed to editing due to spam.) For Basic Bilingual, however, I adapted the code Sudar had added to Bunny Tags, but I don’t fully understand if it works. Backup, try gingerly, and please leave comments here to let others (and myself) know if it works or breaks.

Thanks.

Hairy .htaccess Dreamhost WordPress Problem [en]

[fr] Un des derniers problèmes qui me résistent sur le nouveau serveur.

Here’s roughly what I wrote in a support ticket I sent Dreamhost this morning. If you have any suggestions, I’ll take them.

> Hello,

> I have a site http://cafecafe.ch on which I have installed wordpress
(http://cafecafe.ch/wp/ -> displays as http://cafecafe.ch/blog with
Filosofo Homepage-Control plugin).

> That server has a subdirectory http://cafecafe.ch/membres/ which is
password-protected using .htaccess. Inside is another wordpress
install http://cafecafe.ch/membres/wp.

> I had this set up on my previous host and it worked fine.

> Now, if I go to http://cafecafe.ch/membres/ the request is caught be
the blog installed in http://cafecafe.ch/wp/, and I’m shown the page
http://cafecafe.ch/blog/.

> To make sure it wasn’t a conflict between the two wordpress installs,
I created an empty directory http://cafecafe.ch/test/ which I tried to
password-protect in the same way. The problem is the same (going to
http://cafecafe.ch/test/ displays http://cafecafe.ch/blog). If I
comment out the “request valid-user” line of the .htaccess, I get to
see the directory listing.

> Similarly, if I come back to http://cafecafe.ch/membres and comment
out that line in .htaccess, both wordpress installs work fine, with
permalinks and all (only the private blog isn’t protected anymore,
which won’t do it).

> I’ve tried not doing the password protection manually, and using what
is provided in the panel for that, but the problem remains exactly the
same.

> Weird, isn’t it?

> Hope you can help me out on this. Tried checking error logs but they
were empty.

Job Offer: Chief Architect, coComment [en]

[fr] On embauche chez coComment! Architecte en chef recherché.

I’ve dropped hints with a few people that there were exciting things to come within coComment. There is still much we cannot say, but here’s a fist tidbit (and not the least): we’re hiring.

We are looking for an individual with skills in product design, familiar with the blogging/commenting space from both a technical and user community perspective. Fluent in English and at least one other European language.

Your remit will be to work closely with the Marketing and Technology teams to formulate and lead the development of CoComment.

You will need to be flexbile, fast thinking, passionate about the blogging/commenting space and with the ability to take creative thought and turn it into deliverable product.

In return, CoComment offers a creative, supportive and fast-moving environment, the opportunity to join a rapidly growing company and equity incentives.

Please email matt at cocomment dot com with covering letter and CV, detailing current and expected remuneration.

As a personal note, I’d like to add that there are chances I’ll be reporting to the Chief Architect. It’s of course not yet 100% certain as there are many unknowns, but here I am, probably posting the ad for my future boss’s position…

Crossposted on coComment blog.