DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

I just launched the English language version of my Django-powered travel portal, trogger.de. The newly-launched English version is at trogger.info.

For those who haven’t yet checked out trogger, trogger is a travel-oriented Web community site, where users can maintain travel blogs, post travel reports, share holiday insider tips and publish photo albums. The most recent extension to the trogger platform has been the addition of video blogging support, allowing users to upload and attach video files to their blog entries.
Both portals, the .de and the .info one, are powered by the same application. For the English version I translated the HTML templates and other literal strings using Django’s built-in internationalization (i18n) support.
In fact, the whole translation process has been pretty straightforward and hassle-free (even though it was a lot of mind-numbing work). Django provides a tool to extract string literals, or translation IDs, from the application’s source code as well as from the HTML templates. The extracted strings are stored in “.po” files which can be translated and later compiled into resource files which are used when rendering the page content. The “.po” format is actually not a Django invention. It’s used throughout the Linux world, courtesy of the gettext package. To me, that’s a sure sign of a mature framework: Don’t reinvent the wheel, if what’s there is already the best tool for the job.
Luckily, this standard support for internationalization means that I had a good tool on my Linux box already which I could use to translate the Strings: KBabel. KBabel frees you from the hassle of fiddling with the .po file text format. Going through the translation file is just a matter of repetitive “Ctrl-Shift-PageDn” to get to the next untranslated string and then translating that. Piece of cake!
Currently, the two portals, trogger.de and trogger.info share the same hosted server. I opted to make them two almost completely separate installations, though, to give me the freedom of moving one of them to its own server later on, if bandwidth or disk usage requires it. So, I use Apache’s Virtual Host support to separate the two Django applications. Actually, both installations share the same implementation code. I’m just using the Virtual Host configuration to distinguish between two different settings files, with different database names, different language settings and media directories. This way I only need to maintain the one installation and can keep that up-to-date in a single go, while I keep full flexibility. The Django documentation is really helpful in getting this all set up and running.
So — please check out trogger.info. Participate in the discussions, post your holiday experiences, videos and holiday snaps.

Steve Pavlina recently blogged about top stupid mistakes of the newly self-employed. His list includes:

• Spending too much money
• Spending too little money
• Being too formal
• Failing to focus on value creation
• … and several more

To his list, I would add another mistake: Confusing business revenue and personal spending money. It’s probably a truism, but business (and business revenue) tends to fluctuate. It’s tempting to look at a successful month and extrapolate how much moolah you’re making. That’s a sure recipe for desaster, though.

I’m a bit more conservative in my approach. I budget for my business. I have an overview over how much I spend. You should budget far enough ahead to be able to take into account the payments which don’t come very often but which amount to a sizeable sum. In Germany, and with the kind of organization I’ve chosen (a GmbH — similar to a Ltd. or LLC), you need to file your annual tax returns and income reports. This costs money if you want it done right. And I want to make sure it’s done right, so I’d rather pay someone to do it who knows what he’s doing.

Book Review: The Adsense Code - Joel Comm

I’ve just finished reading ” The AdSense Code“, by Joel Comm. Subtitle: “What Google never told you about making money with AdSense”. Was it worth it? Well… I’ve got mixed feelings about this book.

Joel’s goal is to explain how to make the most money out of Google AdSense advertising. He does this mostly by explaining how to “tweak” your ads so that they blend in with the page contents, how to position the ads on the page for optimal results and how to perform some search engine optimisazion (SEO) to make sure your site appears relevant to Google and attracts visitors. For Joel, visitors == people to click on ads.

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