February 1st, 2009
I got around to implementing a feature I’ve been planning for What Language Is This? today: feedback. Not the comments – that’s been there from the start – but a way of sending immediate feedback on specific results. So that if you disagree with the result, or you know the correct language but it’s not yet supported, just click on “send feedback” that appears with each result, and a simple form pops up that where you can indicate what the problem with that result is.
The entered text can also be sent with the feedback, allowing me to gather more sample texts to use as material for the statistical analysis used as a basis when identifying the language, and for testing (there’s an automatic test feature built in to What Language Is This?, just run selftest() from a JavaScript console on the page and it’ll test all supported languages to check for regressions – very handy when updating the database, since it’s easy to accidentally break some of the fine tuning).
Anyway, I think it’ll be useful, and I hope everyone will use it a lot since it’ll help me improve the site. I’m already getting a lot of useful and encouraging comments so it’s really fun to keep on developing it. For the next update I’ll probably add more languages.
Tags: improvements, language analyzer, projects, testing, web apps
Posted in projects | 2 Comments »
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 | 89 Comments »
