January 27th, 2009
“404 Not Found” pages are pretty cool… I mean, if you have a cool 404 page, no one will ever see it unless something goes wrong, essentially. And there are a lot of cool 404 pages out there on the web – they’re just hard to find.
For that reason, I’ve always thought that I should have a cool 404 page. So one fine day, now more than a year ago (the 20th of October, 2007, to be precise), I took a picture of a road sign for the road numbered 404 in Japan. Interestingly, the location is right between the Imperial Palace and Tokyo Station, at the intersection with road number 1.
You can see the sign from another angle on this Streetview shot. The water you see there is the outer moat of the Imperial Palace, and the big avenue, road number 1, is Hibiya-dori.
So last week I finally got around to putting this up on my site. The 404 page just shows this image as a very low quality (i.e. very high compression) jpeg (same effect as the front page background – I like the look of low quality jpegs), with a random flickering that I think really transmits a feeling of brokenness.
So please go ahead and type in a non-existant url to have a look. Now I guess there are only a few dozen http status codes left to photograph…
Tags: misc, projects, the site, web 1.0, web design
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July 5th, 2008
http://whatlanguageisthis.com/
Since the language analyzer is becoming one of the most used web services that I run, the other day I was thinking that it would be cool get it its own domain (and a .com domain costs just 50 SEK (around 850 yen in normal times) anyway). So I was thinking about what domain name to get – that isn’t already taken – and well, one of the most common search phrases people use to find the language analyzer is “what language is this webpage/blog/text/whatever” and luckily whatlanguageisthis.com was available, so there it is! I think it’s quite easy to remember and very easy to tell people. 4 stars out of 5, perhaps? Pretty good.
Setting up the new site was pretty easy; it’s essentially just a php script that chdirs into the language analyzer directory and continues from there as before.
I also did another nice update: the data file that the app uses to identify the language is now downloaded after the page and all the application javascript files have loaded. That means the page should load much faster, and the user can start reading the instructions or entering text while the data is being downloaded in the background. If the user clicks “Go” before the data file is downloaded, it will stop and wait, while displaying a typical web 2.0-ish loading indicator.
I’m planning to add support for more languages soon, and improve identification of similar-looking languages even further. Anyway, here’s the url for the new site again:
http://whatlanguageisthis.com/
Tags: language analyzer, projects, web apps
Posted in projects | 84 Comments »
May 10th, 2008
Over time I’ve been making some smaller changes to the language analyzer (my language identification web app), like manually tuning it to better distinguish between hard-to-distinguish languages, like the Scandinavian languages, Serbian-Bosnian-Croatian-Slovenian, Afrikaans and Dutch, and Czech and Slovak.
But I’ve been wondering what languages people use it for, so yesterday evening, while drinking shochu (in spite of which I could only find one bug today! but I did write a processing and database-intensive function, n00b style, which I replaced with a single SQL query today…), I added logging of the results. Only when the language identification certainty is reasonably high is it logged, and only the result; the actual text inputted is not sent. This, of course, happens in the background. A language is only logged once per client, and results from clicking the “example” button (Tower of Babel extracts – I like that story) are not logged.
This morning I added the top ranking to the page. It’s generated on the server side in order for the search engines to see it. The top 5 languages for the past seven days are printed. At this time, i.e. about 15 hours after the result logging started, these are Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai.
You can see the currently most inputted languages live: http://henrikfalck.com/languageanalyzer/
Tags: language analyzer, projects, web apps
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