اردوویب بلاگ

I was waiting for the final release of Wordpress 1.5 to work on my Urdu theme. Here is my Urdu blog, I still need to modify a few files and add some javascript buttons in my comments form. Please have a look and let me know what you think of it. This theme has different templates for categories, individual posts, comments, search, sidebar, links etc. I will soon add it in Urdu Wiki with installation instructions and a wp-admin.css to change the font in wp-admin section.

There are some bugs in this release of Wordpress, like mt-import doesn’t work at all. Best way to move a movabletype blog to wordpress is to install wordpress 1.2, run the import-mt.php and then upgrade to 1.5.

I had a little discussion with Nabeel bhai about search engine optimization for Urdu blogs and webpages. I think that we don’t need to worry about it because if there is content somewhere then Google is quite good at indexing it and including it in relevant results. Like this Urdu blog is listed in Google while Urdu wiki is not yet indexed. The reason is not that we have something missing there in Urdu Wiki but its the fact that Google gives priority to blogs. Their bot totally ignores meta tags such as keywords and description. They also ignore the repetetive keywords in the body tags.

Their pagerank system works on how many people link to you and with what text. Like if you search for Danial my blog appears at the top. Search for Urdu blog and Salambazar’s Urdru blog appears at the top, search for Urdu and BBC Urdu tops the results. Why BBC Urdu tops the result? Because people are linking back to every thing they have with the keyword Urdu in it.

I liked the idea of offering cute little graphics for publicity of Urdu Wiki. Why people offer these tiny gif files? Because that way you can make people add a link back to your site using your own words.

Does anyone know of the existence of an Urdu spell-checker? I searched and found quite a few English-Urdu dictionaries online, most of which are in roman. There are a few in unicode like urduword but are amatuer to be considered as a standard Urdu lughat.
If any of Urdu-English dictionaries has been published in computerized printing using, lets say Inpage, then soon we would be finding ways to transcode inpage files to unicode, which then could be used as a database for spellchecker.

Actually I wanted to talk about several topics in this post but as it grew quite large, I decided to split it into two posts. I will post the second part later. So stay tuned.

The Urdu community needs a Unicode Urdu forum. There are already a few Urdu forums that support Urdu in text form. One such forum is at Urdu Life. This forum is based on the InVision Power Board forum software, which is a commercial product. It is still a well-organized forum. I remember people mentioning phpBB, which is open source, and thus free. A fellow blogger Qadeer has already taken up the challenge of translating it into Urdu. I just thought of providing support for Urdu while the translation is still being done. I really had a hard time browsing the source code of phpBB until I discovered PHPXref (PHP Cross Referencing Documentation Generator). It generated an HTML based cross reference of the whole phpBB source code. This made my life considerably easier. I then modified the relevant style sheets and templates (*.tpl files). I was successful in displaying the forum names in Urdu. Then I got stuck at a point where the posted message appeared as hexadecimal codes instead of Urdu text. Asif helped me with his knowledge of php. I used his hints to look at the problematic parts of the code. These are the statements to strip the posted message off HTML tags. I effectively had to castrate that part of the phpBB code. Although Urdu gets posted appropriately now, I am not sure if this is an appropriate solution.

Problems are not over yet. As shown in the images, the post subject gets truncated. I have also tried posting with an Urdu user name and there the user name also gets truncated. I assume that some restriction on some field inside the database is causing this problem. I intend to test drive the Urdu forum by installing the modified phpBB on some free host after this problem is fixed. Again your expert opinion is more than welcome. You are also welcome to download the modified phpBB modules here and have a look if you feel like it. I cannot wait to have a Unicode Urdu forum.

The forum index page properly shows the Urdu forum names and descriptions

The post contents are properly displayed but the post title is truncated. The style sheet is correct. The truncated value is return from the database.

The message index page also shows truncated titles. The same happens with user names entered in Urdu (not shown in the figure).

It must be noted that I worked with the sources of phpBB 2.0 whereas the latest release is phpBB 2.0.11. I will try to prepare a complete protocol of the modifications that I made in different modules. Following are the modules I modified:

• posting.php : receives “submit” and “preview” commands from the post message page


• include\functions_post.php : does the necessary processing on the user name, subject and the message


• language\lang_English\lang_main.php : contains settings such as the general character encoding and the directional characteristics of the html pages


• templates\subSilver\subSilver.css : The style sheet that is included in every page


• templates\subSilver\overall_header.tpl : This is the template that describes the header included in every page on the forum

I have modified a pre-made template from blogger to be used for Urdu only blogs. There are some difficulties here, like I don’t know how to change the date header and make it display day and date in Urdu. Also I am a little worried about font size, line height, etc. Please have a look at this Template. You can look at the blog here. Please let me know what you guys think of it. I think we should discuss and set minimum requirements for the templates we are going to offer in future. Like what font we should use for Urdu, font size, line heights, comments, forms, textareas and other things. Also I think that we should discuss the Urdu terms we are going to use for the words like archives, posts, entries, posted by, posted in, categories, feeds, form feilds, etc. It is important because if we are going to offer templates for popular blogging tools then we should make sure that our templates use the same words. We can also use these words on our own blogs to make them even more popular.

Friends!
Couple of days past I received an email from this guy Qadeer Ahmed Rana that he liked our efforts and that he would get back to us soon. Now I received an email where he says:

I have completed the main file of phpBB and half of faq file, for translation. I hope it will be completed in one or two days InshaAllah. This is very hard to Type.

And please tell me how can I join your group. I have recently written an article on Blogging on Blogger and one on Urdu Fonts, which you can see on my blog.

More, I have some suggestion. I am thinking about templates, as you wrote in your blog. I am thinking that either some General StyleSheet be made which may comply with all of the Blogger’s templates, or We should modify the Templates of Blogger, for Urdu. But the second thing will lead to Piracy, so I think the First one is good. Another thing is that we make our own templates.
Please give me some advice. If I get positive response, I will try to make a general stylesheet or a general template which would be fit for all the colours.

ALLAH Hafiz
QADEER AHMAD RANA

It feels so good to see how people are joining hands with us in this noble cause. I welcome this fellow on behalf of all of us at UrduBlog, and UrduWiki. Qadeer! if you like to be an author on this blog, please let us know through comment or email, and we will create an account for you. For your questions regarding Blogger, I request the attention of concerned colleagues.

درج ذیل بحث “اردو ویب سائٹس” یا “اردو ویب سائٹ” میں سے کسی ایک کے اردو قواعد کے مطابق ہونے سے متعلق ہے۔ یہ ذہن میں رہے کہ اوپر دیے گئے مرکبات کا ویب سائٹس کے مجموعہ کی طرف اشارہ کرنا مقصود ہے۔ بحث کے آغاز سے آگاہی کیلئے اس صفحہ پر دیئے گئے تبصرہ جات سے رجوع کریں۔

اردو میں جمع کا مفہوم دینے کیلئے فقط اسم میں ہی تبدیلی کافی نہیں بلکہ اس سے پہلے آنے والے حروف جار (کا، کے، کی وغیرہ) بھی تبدیل ہوجاتے ہیں۔ مثلا آپ کی مثال میں “آم کا باغ”واحد ہوگا اور جمع کیلئے “آم کے باغات” (لیکن قواعد کے قریب ترین “آموں کے باغات” ہے۔) استعمال ہوگا۔ اگر کسی وجہ سے باغات نہ بھی استعمال کیا جائے (جس کی وجہ سوائے عوام الناس کے زبان زد عام ہونے کے، میرے لئے ناقابل فہم ہے) تو “آم کے باغ” میں “کے” کی موجودگی جمع کی طرف اشارہ کرتی ہے۔ ہمارے معاملہ میں “کے” نا پید ہے۔ براہ مہربانی اس بات کا نوٹس لیا جائے۔ دوسرا اہم معاملہ ہماری اس خآص مثال میں “اردو ویب سائٹس” کا بیک وقت مرکب اضافی اور توصیفی ہونا ہے۔ “اردو” یہاں بحثیت صفت کے بھی استعمال ہورہی ہے اور مضاف الیہ کے بھی۔ سائٹس موصوف بھی ہے اور
مضاف بھی۔ اردو کے قواعد کی رو سے صفت اور موصوف جنس، تعدار (واحد یا جمع) اور حالت (مرفوع، منصوب وغیرہ) میں ایک دوسرے سے مطابقت رکھیں گے۔ یہ علیحدہ بات ہے کہ اردو میں صفات اکٹر واحد بمنزلہ جمع بھی پائی جاتی ہیں مٹلا عمر رفتہ اور ایام رفتہ میں رفتہ۔ اگرچہ عمر اور ایام تعداد میں مختلف ہیں۔ میری گزارش ہے کہ اگر سائٹس ناگوار گزرتا ہے تو اس کا اردو نعم البدل استعمال کیا جائے ، یا سائٹ کو اردو میں بطور “جمع” بھی داخل کیا جائے، یا قواعد تبدیل کئے جائیں، اور یا اسے استعمال کرلیا جائے۔

یہاں ایک اور بات کرنے کو بھی میرا جی چاہ رہا ہے۔ وہ یہ کہ اگرچہ انگریزی نے دنیا کی تمام زبانوں کو متاثر کیا ہے لیکن ہمارے ہاں لوگ بھی متاثر ہوگئے ہیں۔ میں نے خود ملاحظہ کیا ہے کہ عربی اور فارسی وغیرہ میں اگرچہ عام استعمال میں بہت سے نئے الفاظ آ چکے ہیں لیکن لکھنے میں بہت خالص زبان استعمال کی جاتی ہے۔ اور قواعد سے بالکل بھی انحراف نہیں کیا جاتا۔ ہمارے ہاں لوگ چاہتے ہیں کہ جو بازار میں استعمال ہورہا ہے، قواعد اردو میں بھی وہی لکھ دیا جائے۔ اگر کوئی قواعد اور اصول کی بات کرے تو اسے نکو بنایا جاتا ہے۔ جو سمجھ سے بالاتر نہیں ہے اگر ہم دیکھیں کہ آئین پاکستان (جو سلسلہ روز و شب امور حکومت کے قواعد کا مجموعہ ہی تو ہے!) کے بارے میں ہمارے حکمران کیا نظریہ رکھتے ہیں۔ اللہ مولوی عبدالحق کو غریق رحمت کریں۔ مجھے اندازہ ہے انہیں کیا کچھ نہیں کرنا پڑا ہوگا۔

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

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.

More fonts are available. Please use following:

• ::ur:: for nafees web naskh
• ::ur-nast:: for nafees nastaleeq
• ::ur-at:: for bbc asiatype

Examples are on sandbox. And Nabeel I noted your complaint. It took me sometime to reproduce the bug. In IE, yes, the external links give some strange behaviour. Firefox goes fine. I will try to look into it and post the results here.

In plain html, we often have (”) double quotes, and (’) single quotes. A special php function called htmlspecialchars is used to convert them to their char codes. For some unexplained reasons, even if you supply “utf-8” as an argument for the char-set to this function, it still converts all utf-8 chars to their codes. So in all of my php-pages, whether of Wordpress, or UrduWiki (WikkaWiki), I comment out this function, or in other words the special char translation, otherwise, the display seems quite okay but in editing, you will get codes like (& # 12541 ; ) instead of Urdu unicode characters which are quite impossible to edit.