اردوویب بلاگ

I started blogging in Urdu almost a year ago. I haven’t written much in Urdu, but it has been a good experience. Two of my posts about blogging in Urdu have been among the most popular posts here.

The Urdu blogosphere is extremely small right now. There aren’t even a lot of Urdu websites. Also, most Urdu websites do not use Unicode text, but use images for their Urdu content.

Therefore, I thought it might be a good idea to create a website which collects together all sorts of information and instructions about Urdu blogging. For that purpose, I think these items should be present:

1. An Urdu Bloggers directory: It should have a list of all Urdu weblogs. These might be divided into categories based on language (monolingual, bilingual, etc.), topic, frequency of Urdu posts or other such stuff. We can even have RSS syndication of the recent posts from Urdu blogs. Is there a way to do that so that we syndicate only the Urdu language posts for multilingual blogs?
2. An Urdu Bloggers webring: Right now, we have a webring here. It would, however, be better to integrate the webring with the directory since then the blogger list wouldn’t need to be maintained in two places. Can anyone point to any Perl or PHP code which we could use?
3. Instructions on how to blog in Urdu for blogger.com, Wordpress and Movable Type.
4. Regarding the previous point, one option could be to provide some basic templates which work well for Urdu, preferable for bilingual (Urdu as major and English as minor language).
5. Links and instructions for setting up one’s computer (Windows XP and Windows 2000 at the very least, but preferably other operating systems too) to read/write Urdu.
6. A package of Urdu fonts.
7. Links to Urdu related web resources.
8. Links to websites that use Urdu Unicode text.

1. Links to good and useful in content Urdu websites which use images.

   Is there anything else that you would like to suggest?

   All these pages (or at least most) should be bilingual (Urdu and English). One option could be to have two columns, one in each language. The other option could be to have 2 versions of the same page. Which would be better?

   Now some of the items in the list above are available here and there on Asif’s blog and mine as well as elsewhere. The purpose is to collect these things, make them concise and clear and create THE Urdu blogging resource.

   I suggested this to Asif who posted about it here asking for suggestions and help from readers. He also suggested translating some bulletin board software, like phpBB, to Urdu.

   Danial proposed in the comments there that we should start a blog dedicated to this effort. That is now done. An Urdu Blogging Weblog is online where we’ll discuss what we want to do and how as well as put up updates and drafts.

   So, if you are interested in Urdu blogging in any way, we would like your help. There is lots of stuff to do, like site design, php/perl coding, blogging software hacking, etc.

   Cross-posted to Procrastination weblog.

   This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 11:00 pm and is filed under English, Task List. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.