Tagi18n⁵

Every feature on this site has a page that says what it does. Fewer say why it is there, and almost none say what the week before it existed was like. That part was written somewhere else: on sean.cz, the archive this engine was taken out of and the site every change lands on first — 6,655 posts going back to 2003. Until last week it was written in Czech only.

Since 7 October sean.cz reads in English as well: 126 posts, each the same post as its Czech original with the words in a second language, the way a second language works here. Among them is the whole series that follows this engine from the day the site moved onto it, The new Sean.cz: twenty-one parts so far, July to October.

A few places to start, if you want a sample rather than the whole run:

Saturday, LinuxDays in Prague, a stand run by friends from OSCloud — Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Matrix, the services for people who want their data where they can see it. A full day behind one table, and not a single talk seen. This engine was there for the first time in person: on a leaflet, and in conversation whenever the Fediverse came round to "and where would I write?"

Four squares on an A4

The leaflet is one sheet. Four panels — write, move, deploy, show — each with a terminal excerpt and a QR code. None of the codes lands on a page made for the event. Each one opens a tag page this site already had: /tag/authoring, /tag/migration, /tag/deploy, /tag/appearance. The site's own archive, sorted by what a stand gets asked, was the landing page. Nothing was built for the day that would be stale the day after.

Somebody translates their posts, opens the Czech half of the site — and the menu still says Writing, the footer still says Links, and every tag on every pill is the English word. The posts were only ever half of what a reader reads. The rest is what the site says about itself, and in 1.9 that has a language too.

Somebody writes in Czech, and some of the people who would read it don't read Czech. The usual answer is a second blog — a second archive, a second set of tags, a second feed — and within a year the two have drifted apart: a post fixed in one and not the other, a tag renamed on one side, a reader who switches languages and lands somewhere that no longer matches. blog.sh 1.9 gives a different answer: one site, and the other language beside it.

The one way to contribute to ./blog.sh without writing a line of Ruby is to translate it — and it's a single YAML file.

Everything the reader sees — navigation, dates, archive headings, the search box, the comments prompt — comes from a locale file. The whole guide lives here:

docs/localization.md — adding a language to ./blog.sh

Three things make it genuinely easy:

• A language is data, not code. You copy en.yml, rename it, translate values. No templates touched, no Ruby read.
• Fallback runs per key. A half-finished translation works from day one — anything you haven't translated yet simply shows up in English until you get to it.
• Only en.yml must be complete. Yours can grow at whatever pace your weekends allow.

English, Czech and German are already in. Yours would make four.