Archive for the ‘Task List’ Category

Digital Urdu Library ڈیجیٹل اردو لائبریری

Sunday, October 30th, 2005

Dear friends,

AssalamOAlaikum. As you all know, we at urduweb.org are striving to promote Urdu on the net. Our aim is to provide a common platform to the Urdu community for doing collaborative efforts for promoting Urdu and we do need a combined effort to achieve our goals. Recently there has been a discussion on the Urdu Mehfil Forum about creating an online libray in the style of Project Gutenberg and work has actually started on this. Our friend Mohammad Shakir Aziz is coordinating this project. In the following, Mr Shakir explains the need and aims of this project and invites you to join this effort.

عزیز دوستو، السلام علیکم

جیسا کہ آپ سب جانتے ہیں، اردو ویب انٹرنیٹ پر اردو کی ترویج کے لیے کوشاں ہے۔ ہماری یہ کوشش ہے کہ اردو ویب کی صورت میں ہم اردو کمیونٹی کو اردو کی ترویج کے سلسلے میں مشترکہ کاوشوں کے لیے ایک مشترکہ پلیٹ فارم فراہم کر دیں اور یہ کام ہم سب مل جل کر ہی سر انجام دے سکتے ہیں۔ حال ہی میں اردو محفل فورم پر پراجیکٹ گٹن برگ کی طرز پر انٹرنیٹ پر ڈیجیٹل لائبریری تشکیل دینے کے بارے میں تجاویز پیش کی گئی اور اس سلسلے میں باقاعدہ کام شروع کر دیا گیا ہے۔ ہمارے دوست محمد شاکر عزیز اس پراجیکٹ کی کوآرڈینیشن کی ذم داری سنبھالے ہوئے ہیں۔ ذیل کی تحریر میں شاکر اس پراجیکٹ کے اغراض و مقاصد کے بارے بیان کر رہے ہیں تاکہ آپ بھی اردو کی ترویج کےاس کام میں شریک ہوں۔
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اردو ہم جس کو کہتے ہیں داغ
سارے جہاں میں دھوم ہماری زباں کی ہے
اردو اور سائنس آجکل اردو کے چاہنے والوں کا پسندیدہ موضوع ہے۔ کچھ کریں یا نہ کریں مگر یہ ضرور کہیں گے کہ ہر چیز اردو میں ہو۔ استعمال چاہیں نہ کریں ۔ کمپیوٹر بھی سائنس میں شمار کیا جاتا ہے ۔ زندگی میں کمپیوٹر کے عمل دخل نے جہاں ہمیں اور پہلوؤں سے متاثر کیا ہے وہاں ہماری زباندانی پر بھی اثرات اور بڑے بد اثرات چھوڑے ہیں ۔ اس کی مثال یہ لے سکتے ہیں کہ رومن میں چیٹ کر کر کے اب میرا یہ حال ہو گیا ہے کہ بعض اوقات شبہ ہونے لگتا ہے کہ شاید اردو میں لکھے اس لفظ کے ہجے ٹھیک نہیں حالانکہ ٹھیک ہوتے ہیں ۔ بات چلی تو عرض کرتا چلوں اردو کا ہاتھ سے لکھنا بھی چونکہ تقریبا عنقا ہوتا ہے، بعد از میٹرک تو اس کا حال بھی برا ہے۔ اس بات کا انکشاف ہم پر اس وقت ہوا جب بی کام پارٹ ون کا اسلامیات کا پرچہ دے رہے تھے اور کسی سے لکھا نہیں جا رہا تھا اردو لکھنے کی عادت نہیں تھی ہاتھوں کو پچھلے ٣ سالوں سےتو کیا خاک لکھا جاتا نتیجتًا تمام لڑکے پرچہ دینے کے بعد دیر تک ہاتھ اور بازو ملتے رہے کہ درد ہو رہا تھا۔

خیر یہ تو بات سے بات تھی۔ ذکر ہو رہا تھا کمپیوٹر میں اردو کا ۔ کمپیوٹر کی بات ہو اور انٹرنیٹ کی نہ ہو یہ تو ہو ہی نہیں سکتا۔ اردو کا نام بھی کمپیوٹر کے لیے حرام تھا چند سال پہلے تک مگر اب کچھ نئی تکنیکوں اور کچھ ٹوٹکوں نے کمپیوٹر پر اردو لکھنا اردو پڑہنا ممکن بنا دیا ہے۔ جب یہ سب ہو گیا تو اردو کے چاہنے والوں کو ہوش آیا کہ اب انٹرنیٹ پر بھی بس ہر طرف اردو ہی اردو کر دیں ۔ اسی سلسلے کی ایک کڑی کے طور پر اردو ویب آرگ کا قیام عمل میں آیا ۔ جہاں سے ناچیز کے اصرار پر ایک پراجیکٹ یا منصوبہ بسلسلہ اردو ای بکس شروع کیا گیا۔

اگرچہ ابھی ابتدائی مراحل میں ہے اور انتہائی نگہداشت کے وارڈ میں داخل مریض کی طرح اس کی حالت نازک ہے مگر امید ہے کہ بہتری ہوگی۔ اردو ای بکس یوں تو موجود ہیں انٹرنیٹ پر مگر یہ سب تصویری اردو میں ہیں تحریری اردو میں نہیں ۔ تصویری اردو وقتی حل ہے مستقل حل نہیں چناچہ یہ منصوبہ جو اردو محفل کے اراکین کی طرف سے ترقی پذیر ہے میں اس بات کو یقینی بنایا جائے گا کہ اردو کی کتابیں مہیا کی جائیں جو:
1۔تحریری اردو میں ہوں
2۔مفت اور ہر ایک کے لیے ہوں
3۔ خصوصًا اردو کی کلاسیکل کتابیں جن کے نایاب ہونے کا خدشہ ہے یا کم ملتی ہیں یا انھیں اردو میں ایک مقام حاصل ہےاور صاحبان ذوق ان کو سینت سینت کر رکھنا پسند کرتے ہیں۔
4۔اسلامی کتابیں جیسے قرآن بہ ترجمہ و تفسیرقرآن،احادیث کی کتب،سیرت نبی اکرم صلی اللہ علیہ وسلم پر کتب، صحابہ کرام رضوان اللہ علیھم اجمعین کی سیرت وغیرہ۔
5۔اردو کی لغات جن سے اردو داں طبقے میں اردو کی صلاحیت بڑھے۔
6۔ایسی کتابیں جن کی کاپی رائٹ نہ ہو یہ ختم ہو گیا ہو ہو یا متعلقہ ادارہ انکی آن لائن اشاعت کی اجازت دے دے۔

اس سلسلے میں ہمیں ہرممکن تعاون درکار ہے ہم فی الحال علمی تعاون مانگ رہے ہیں۔ اگر:
1۔ آپ کے پاس کوئی کتاب ان پیچ یا کسی بھی اردو اڈیٹر میں لکھی ہوئی موجود ہے، آپ اپنی غیر مطبوعہ تحاریر(بشرطیکہ معیار پر پوری اتریں ) یا اپنی یا اپنے ادارہ کی کسی کتاب کا کاپی رائٹ دے سکتے ہوں۔
2۔آپ کچھ وقت نکال کے ہمارے ساتھ اس کام میں ہاتھ بٹا سکتے ہوں لکھنے کے سلسلے میں(اور انشاءاللہ مستقبل قریب میں تحاریر کی پروف ریڈنگ کے سلسلے میں جب کام کی رفتار زیادہ ہوگی)
3۔آپ اس کام کو آگے بڑھانے کے سلسلے میں ہمیں کوئی مفید مشورہ دینا چاہتے ہوں کوئی تکنیکی بات جس سے اس منصوبے کو نکھارنے میں مدد ملے۔
4۔اس کے علاوہ کوئی بھی ایسی بات، کوئی تعاون جو آپ کے خیال میں اس سلسلے میں مفید ثابت ہو سکتا ہو
اگر ہمیں فراہم کریں گے ہم بصد شکریہ اسے قبول کریں گے اور اسے آپکے نام کے ساتھ اپنے منصوبے میں شامل کریں گے۔ اس صدقہ جاریہ کا صلہ تو اللہ ہی دے سکتا ہے مگر دنیا میں جو خوشی اس سے آپ کو اور اردو کے چاہنے والوں کو ملے گی اس کا کوئی بدل نہیں ہوسکتا ۔
اللہ کریم ہمیں توفیق دے ۔
خیر اندیش
www.urduweb.org کی جانب سے‘دوست‘

Urduweb Blog

Sunday, July 24th, 2005

Welcome to the new location of our blog. Bear with us as we tidy up and fix things here and there but this should be (mostly) working.

Now, we have the following set up on Urduweb:

More stuff will soon follow.

Setting Up Urduweb

Tuesday, June 28th, 2005

I was remiss in my last post in not thanking Nabeel and Asif for their help, both monetary and otherwise.

Now that we have setup hosting, let’s start the process of moving and creating content. My ideas are given below. Feel free to disagree or suggest anything else.

  • Urdu Planet has already been moved here. I have set up redirects in the .htaccess file in the old location so that it forwards to the new one.
  • Urdu Wiki is currently here. Asif, can you copy it over to the following URL: http://www.urduweb.org/wiki/? .htaccess redirect should be easy but I am not sure if it is possible in the current hosting setup of Urdu Wiki. I would be willing to help Asif make the move.
  • This blog has to be converted to Wordpress 1.5 and moved to Urduweb with the following URL: http://www.urduweb.org/blog/. Danial and Asif, both of you have experience with WP1.5 and have customized it for bilingual blogging. So I need your help here.
  • Software includes the utilities and tools developed by Nabeel as well as Asif’s fonts package and Qadeer’s localization of phpBB for Urdu. Can you guys come up with a decent folder organization under http://www.urduweb.org/software/?
  • Urdu Forum needs to be created at http://www.urduweb.org/forum/. Qadeer and Nabeel should be able to take care of that. I can help if needed.
  • Main page is to be another Wordpress 1.5 driven site with links to all the sections as well as some periodic content like a blog. The Pages feature of Wordpress should also come in handy here. Since WP1.5 is involved, Asif and Danial would be needed. Nabeel has expressed interest before in the sort of content we should put here. So this one is a group thing.
  • Urdu Blogs Directory needs to be reorganized and set up properly in one location. Right now, we have a list on the main page of this blog, a webring, a list on the Urdu Wiki as well as one on Urdu Planet. All of these need to be combined and a system needs to be set up for them to be easily updated and new blogs added. I take responsibility for this. This blog directory will be located at http://www.urduweb.org/directory/.
  • Site Design is also very important. All of the subsites and pages of Urduweb should have a distinctive but similar design in terms of colors and other presentational/CSS features. This requires someone with knowledge of CSS as well as someone with a good artistic sense for the web. I am definitely not that person. Any volunteers?

If anyone is interested in contributing and helping out, please let me know so that I can give you the needed access to the urduweb account. In addition to the work required setting up the site, we’ll definitely need continuous work in keeping it current and interesting. So any help is welcome and appreciated.

Setting Up the New Urdu Site

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005

While the voting goes on about the domain name, let us consider the tasks we need to do once the domain is available.

The following sites need to be moved to the new domain:

  1. This blog, Urdu Blogging: We need to switch the blog to Wordpress. Asif, can we use Wordpress 1.5 or should we stick to 1.2 for now?
  2. Urdu blogs webring: In addition to moving the home page of the webring, I also want to switch it to some php/MySQL-based solution instead of Ringsurf.
  3. Urdu Planet: This should be simple to move.
  4. Urdu Wiki: Asif, we need to coordinate on that.
  5. Urdu Freeware: In addition to Nabeel’s WebEditor and UrduEditor, is there anything else? What about Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type templates optimized for Urdu blogs? Also, Qadeer, how about putting up the Urdu translation of phpBB here too? Does anyone want to set up a mirror to this?

In addition to moving these to their new locations, we need to do it in a way that we don’t break existing links. So forwarding of each page (and not just the main page) needs to be properly set up at the same time. I would hope that this forwarding would stay up for at least a few months. However, the forwarding/redirect should not be completely transparent to the visitor as we want the visitor to know that the page has moved so that (s)he can update her/his bookmarks. The META Refresh tag seems appropriate for the purpose. The .htaccess Redirect also might work.

If possible, it might also be a good idea to search for links to these items and inform the owners of those websites where the links are that our sites have moved.

In addition to all the moves, I would also like to setup an Urdu forum. Qadeer, can you please help us there? Guys, any ideas of the design of forum topics?

We would also need to maintain the main site as well as other static pages. A CMS would be really useful. Nabeel mentioned a few:

  1. Mambo
  2. Drupal
  3. Typo3

I have heard only of Drupal and that seemed too complicated to me. Also, we have to consider how much modification any of these would need to generate Urdu or bilingual pages. Are there any other CMSes out there that could be useful? If a CMS is too much work right now, how about using Wordpress or other blog software to generate static pages as well?

Among ideas for the future, how about setting up an RSS aggregation of other Unicode Urdu websites (news etc.)? Any other ideas?

Now comes the question of responsibility. Setting all of this up and maintaining it is going to require at least a few people. Therefore, please let me know if you are interested (I am looking at you, Asif, Danial and Nabeel and others too!) I’ll setup shell access accounts for everyone involved. Then we have to coordinate about who is doing what and who maintains what.

Before the weekend

Friday, February 4th, 2005

The weekend is approaching and that could mean a slight surge of activities in UrduWiki. I have been thinking about the further strategy of improving and promoting UrduWiki. I strongly feel that people with development and programming skills should also join their efforts together for creating better tool support for creating Urdu content. At the moment I have little or no knowledge of php. That means I will have to spend some time chewing at php’s syntax. Following are my ideas and suggestions.

Wikilog or Wiki Weblog

Has anybody heard of the term Wikilog? This is supposed to be a hybrid of a bog and a wiki. Some say it is a synergy. There is even a MovableType add-in for creating and managing a wikilog. To be honest I did not fully grasp the idea behind it but I would my fellows to have a look at it. It might have a potential improving the collaborative work

A Consistent Navigation System

For the time being, Asif is shouldering complete responsibility of maintaining UrduWiki. My idea is to help him by providing ideas on improving the layout of the wiki. We will soon need a better navigation system inside UrduWiki. The website of WikkaWiki points to some nice custom layouts. I would request bloggers with experience of website design to help improve the look and feel of UrduWiki. The amount of Urdu content is relatively small right now, but this can change pretty soon. A good layout and a consistent navigation system are essential for effectively finding information from large content.

WYSIWIG Wiki

Although UrduWiki is a wonderful platform for creating and gathering Urdu content, I think typing Urdu inside wiki’s editor is rather cumbersome. Mixing English words inside Urdu sentences looks ugly because it reverses the order of text in the paragraph. This always causes confusion. I have been looking for ways to improve editing inside the wiki. I did a google search on WYSIWYG Wiki and I founds links to many wiki editors with lots of features and funny names (e.g. WysiwygWikkiTikkiTavi). One such wiki editor is SPAW. It would be nice if better wiki editors are integrated into UrduWiki.

Spreading the word

I checked today the CRULP’s website. The people at CRULP develop the Nafees family of fonts. The download page for Nastaleeq Nafees font shows a counter of nearly 10,000 visits. Considering the OpenType Nastaleeq font to be a historic development, this counter is disappointingly small. What is the reason. People are not taking interest or they do not know about it. I always thought that people were enthusiastic about using Urdu on their PCs. I still remember immensely talented young lads who developed their own Urdu editors with bitmap fonts. The software exhibition Softech at FAST Lahore was always full of young programmers eagerly showing off their Urdu based tools. It has been a while now that Windows XP, which supports unicode Urdu, is mainstream. Technologies like OpenType Urdu fonts and unicode compatible editors are also in place. I find it rather surprising that there is such still a small number of urdu websites, many of which still use graphic Urdu. The revolution in online Urdu content that I hoping for was not to be.

It looks like the computer science students and the developer community have not really caught up with the developments on the Unicode Urdu front. I might be wrong but one reason could be the lack of information and communication. A fellow blogger Ejaz Asi (عاصی؟) once posted a comment on my blog suggesting that we should voluntarily promote Urdu fonts and well known Urdu sites such as BBC’s Urdu web site and Jang’s web site using the Nafees Web Naskh font by adding links to these in our blogs and websites. That might help standardize the use of Urdu fonts which would also mean easier work on part of the Urdu web-content producers. I have a similar suggestions to all fellow bloggers. You could do us a favour by adding a link to this blog and the link to UrduWiki in your blogs. We need more involvement of people for creating quality content.

Have a nice weekend.

Nabeel

Urdu pages in plain HTML

Thursday, February 3rd, 2005

I think that we should do something like a simple guide to write plain HTML Urdu pages. It would help some beginners to understand what they need to do with their blogs to make them Urdu enabled. Like something to explain character encoding and doctype,dir and lang attributes. There are many HTML resources on the web but most of them don’t talk about such things they assume that every one is going to develop a web page in en-US.

Web Standards and Urdu

Monday, January 31st, 2005

I was thinking about this whole thing last night and there is something I am a little worried about. I think that in our efforts to popularize Urdu blogs we should try to offer solutions which are standard compliance. Like here in this blog Zack is using post titles in the individual entries archive pages. I am afraid that this is probably not a good thing for Urdu posts. Like this URI:

http://urdu.zackvision.com/archives/2005/01/oeoeoeoeoe.html

It is not a good choice to use oeoeoeoeoe.html for many reasons. I think that entry numbers would be better in a bilingual blog or an Urdu blog. Same goes for dates we should make sure that the dates of our individual posts are visible in Urdu but are also available in English for search spiders to read and index our pages. We should also think about RSS feeds. RSS readers should be made aware of the fact that which feed is in Urdu. Language tags should always be used whenever possible.

Why these things are important at this point? Because if our efforts are going to increase the number of Urdu pages on the web then it is our responsibility to make these pages more readable, accessible and standard compliance for future. It would also help future web spiders to differentiate Urdu pages from Persian pages or Arabic pages.

I agree with Nabeel’s suggestion that English words should be used for technical reasons. Like at one point Asif used Urdu word “Tanseeb” for installation I think word installation is itself quite good and more popular in Urdu. Avoiding such words our documents would become more readable. Nabeel’s list is comprehensive. I also liked the suggestion of using an image based urdu page or an urdu image of details on how to install Urdu. It would help readers who are not able to understand English or people who are not much familiar with computing.

Task List — First Draft

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

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.
  9. 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.