I’ve been traveling around the world for almost three years now. Without a doubt, nothing is more frustrating than trying to access Google, say in Argentina for example, and being presented with a Spanish website. I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say 80% of companies use some form of GeoIP (geo-location using the IP address as a means to determine where you are) to decide which language to serve you. The problem of course is that even though I am currently in Portugal, I don’t speak Portuguese! So using GeoIP to determine where someone lives is fine, but it should never be used as a ...

Thanks to everyone who left some feedback the other day about the new translation plugin. I’ve had some really great comments about it, and even the odd person that’s really anxious to test it out. I’m hoping to put a version up online tonight for people to download and try for themselves. For those people who didn’t catch it, what I did was write a WordPress plugin that takes advantage of the Google AJAX language API to dynamically translate the content of my blog into whatever language you as a reader ask for (by adjusting your browser settings). This works in both directions: blog entries ...