Monday, August 16, 2004

Arabic vs. English

I'm rather disappointed with the pathetically low "voter turnout" for the survey I put on the right, asking whether you preferred an Arabic, English or Bi-Lingual blog. As of this posting, there only 56 votes and I hope none of them are duplicates. Maybe I had delusions of this blog reaching a wider audience; 56 ain't exactly wide!

I will keep the survey up on the blog till this coming weekend then I'll remove it and tally the votes, even though I'm not holding my breath for a last-minute surge in voting. So far, the majority of voters have asked for a bi-lingual blog and that's what I personally predicted. I have no problem doing a bi-lingual blog, or even a full Arabic one, since I am fortunately just as literate in Arabic.

My only problem is that my Arabic typing is not as good or as fast as my English typing which I can now do without even looking at the keyboard, just like a good secretary! Blogger supports Arabic text but it's still awkward and the fonts are all weird. I like this blog Moodless because it's fully functional in Arabic and the fonts look great, but I'm betting it wasn't done with Blogger.

Is TypePad any better for Arabic blogs? Will it import an existing Blogger blog into its setup? Tell me!

9 comments:

  1. stay with english, as you say you can do it blind. If you do it in Arabic it would take you ages.

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  2. I also voted for you to stay with English.. We have like a thousand Arabic Newspapers whereas the english ones are only 2 that are based in Kuwait.. we need more commentary and news written in the english language to raise awareness between every different type of person that visits this blog.. And I for one would like to say how important and useful this blog is hehe I get well all of the useful latest information that there are when reading your blog instead of the newspapers :P

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  3. Typepad is basicly MovableType with mods, if you want I can give you an account on MT to play with. Moodless is using WordPressI think the best way to have arabic fonts show up correctly on a web browser is by using CSS and placing font tags telling which arabic font to use.

    If you want to use arabic keyboard I got this great program that remapped the keboard as ASDF arabic. So A=alef B=ba`a etc. Its very convient when you have the english qwerty keyboard memorized.

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  4. Nibaq, that sounds like a great program since I do type according to how the word sounds. Would I have to re-label my keyboard?

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. Here is a link to my review on the ASDF Arabic keyboard.

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  7. I can help you to make modifications on a Blogger template to make look good in Arabic.

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  8. these votes are also not accurate since a person can vote more then once. I have voted 3 times to keep it in english for example and can keep voting for english only :)

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  9. للأسف لم ألحق التصويت! و لكن عليك بالعربية.
    أبسط سبب: المحتوى العربي على إنترنت أقل بكثير، و الجيد منه يكاد لا يذكر (عدا الصحف و الأخبار)، و لن أقول أنك بهذا تنأى بنفسك أن تبيع الماء في حارة السقائين.
    أما عن موضوع سرعتك في الكتابة بالعربية فهو أدعى لأن تدرب نفسك. لا أنصحك أن تستعمل برنامج تحويل الأحرف اللاتينية إلى العربية لأنك لن يمكنك الكتابة من دونه لاحقا.
    Moodless جيد فعلا.
    و ما رأيك في طي المتصل?

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Keep it clean, people!