plugins :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

I seem to be noticing more and more blogs with a little array of different national flags, clickable to transform the text of a blog instantly into a language of choice. And I know from stats reports that visitors to this site are by no means all from English-speaking countries. So while I imagine a lot of those visitors are fluent in English I’ve been wondering lately whether it would be a good idea, or not, to have automatic language translation installed.

The flags are of course not essential. Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog has a dropdown menu with the languages listed, on the header of the blog.

For WordPress blogs, there are plugins to provide a translation facility. It seems to me that there are at least three issues for anyone thinking about using one of these plugins for a business blog:

where do you find a reliable plugin
how do you install it and get it running properly
how good is the translation?

I’m finding it a bit of a juggle at the moment to post here consistently. I seem to be spending more time on reorganizing the machinery than I really want to, but I’m going to be doing a lot of travelling soon – China, USA – and this sort of thing is better done, in my experience, at home base rather than on the road.

A good slab of researching and writing time yesterday went on the blogoz overview post I did for my deswalsh.com blog. The day before and late into the evening, I spent a lot of time checking out potential new themes for that blog and then installing and tweaking the one I finally decided upon, Brian Gardner’s Silhouette theme. I swapped that for another of his themes, Vertigo Blue 3-column, which is a very good theme, but was not really what I wanted for the longer term.

I quite like also the theme I’m currently using here, Vertigo Red 3-column, which is the same as Vertigo Blue 3-column except for the colour. But again, I’m not comfortable with the graphic image in terms of how I see this blog’s future development. Not sure how best to put that, but while I see it as stylish, I also see it as a bit sombre or heavy for what I want.

Another consideration is that I’m really irritated by a problem for which I can’t find an instant solution, a database error, which manifests itself as I type this, in a block of text – below the editing tool box – as follows:

WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress_thinkinghomebusiness_com.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY cat_ID

I’m not unique in experiencing this problem. Nor does it appear that anyone has a simple solution – at least that’s how it looks to my non-technical eye from studying exchanges like this. The problem is apparently related to installation of the latest version of WordPress, 2.3.

I’ve tried out a whole stack of WordPress themes today/tonight. I’ve been sticking largely to the 3 column ones, as I find that gives me more scope for placing items in the sidebars. And, as this site is using the latest version of WordPress, 2.3, at first I was using just themes that are listed by WordPress as compatible with WP 2.3. Then I started to try a few others. I’m guessing that there are themes which are in fact WP 2.3 compatible but for some or other reason are not on the list. My inclination is to err on the side of prudence and install a theme which is on the list.

One theme I like – and have tested successfully on one of my currently less-trafficked blogs (not, however, upgraded as yet to WP 2.3 – is Big Blue. It has a lot of what I’m looking for and is on the list as WP 2.3 compatible.

Big Blue theme