Newspaperindex - the blog | Newspapers of the world, media and free speech

Sorry for the disorder in the index. I am building a Chinese and a German version of the site at the same time, right now, and it is a mess. One of the problems is that I do not read Chinese, not even the simplified (I am sure it can be made simpler). Another one is that I do not understand German (from school I remember that German also is far more complicated than it should be) - Hey! Thanks for doing the translation Helena!

The main problem though is that the system that keeps track of all the newspapers, countries and languages on the server can not sort new entries. When I have inserted all the names of countries in for instance Spanish, then they are sorted pr. default like the English index.

This is where my mouse enters. After all country names have been inserted in a certain language, I see a list, that has to be sorted alphabetically and the only tools is one button that says ‘up’ and another one that say ‘down’. I mark a country, press the button and wait for half a second – and the language move one step up or down the list.

It is not very bad with Spanish and German, since most countries are written the same way as in English. Some are not - like Austria that becomes Österreich in German. To place Österreich in the right position I have to press the ‘down’ button more than 200 times, and there is no auto fire function. Actually there is a small delay for every click because I am handling the server from another computer. This means that 200 clicks takes about 100 seconds. It is OK with a couple of countries.

-But then there is Chinese. I have managed to get a list of all country names in Chinese with an English translation next to each country. These signs are completely different sorted and the result is that each country is placed in an average of 107 places away from where they should be, since there is 214 countries in total in the index. I have done the math: 214 countries are each going to be clicked 107 times means 22.898 clicks on my mouse…




See Newspaper Index in German and Chinese (in slow progress) here

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