Query results: Community tools

Since Jabber rooms are not as widely used as IRC channels and this causes that some people have trouble to access them, we have created an IRC channel at Freenode.net for our translators, which replaces our Jabber room.

The new channel is #glm-l18n.

The participate page is always there for pointers, but if you look for more exciting things to work on,  we have plenty of areas where you could have leg space for creativity and autonomous work.

We are still lacking (human) resources to work on the following topics:

• Link button revolution. We’d like to go from the current ugly stack of buttons, to something authoritative, elegant, and simple —think spreadfirefox. We’d be much better off with five sizes and ten buttons, with a single icon.
• Screenshot perfection. We’re looking for extremely well thought-out sets of screenshots for getgnulinux.org and translations, localized in eight languages. (this is ticket #41)
• Precise visit statistics tracking. If you think that you could write a script that outputs, say, the number of Windows visitors who visited at least two pages in the past week, we’d love to hear from you!
• CSS mastership. We’re maniac about accessibility and legibility, but could still do better. Improving font rendition on IE6, making sure things will display fine when we release a Chinese translation, adapting to mobile devices browsers, are things we’re thinking about.
• Linking module. Managing an affiliate system for linking to our websites will be the first milestone of Animador, our grassroots marketing platform. If PHP development is your thing, you might want to have a look.
• Articulate writing. We have just started working on GetFreedomware.com, the upcoming replacement of SoftwareLiberty.com. We are looking for polished, concise, powerful phrases to get the message to everyday visitors. (more to come very soon in the forum).
• Elegant web design. Our Linux FAQ page has grown to be difficult to read and navigate. Accessibility and simplicity are your mottoes? This might be for you.
• Multi-cultural expertise. If you know what it takes to reach the Japanese community, or what kind of domain name would suit an Arabic translation, or how to best manage cross-border variations in languages —well, you can educate us =)

Enthusiastic coulda-woulda-shoulda talkers are easy to find. Participants who get things done are priceless. If you think you can help, feel free to start working, make yourself known, and we’ll hand you the keys. Thousands of daily visitors will benefit from your skills, and you’ll get eternal gratitude from the rest of us! =)

We are proud to complete our six-month-long work on the internationalization of GetGNULinux.org. What was the purpose, and what is coming next?

First, we are now able to grow quickly and efficiently in other languages and that is important to us. As small organization, (hopefully) heading in the right direction, we had been missing this ability for a long time. We hope to see more translations developed soon.

But the exciting part is the big number in the title. Today, approximately 1,000 Windows web surfers find us through search engines every day¹. If we manage to bring this number to 8,000 , over one year we can successfully inform one million people of the merits of Linux and freedomware.

With your help, this is reachable.

• Let’s learn more languages. Help hundreds or thousands of daily visitors to learn about GNU/Linux by translating to your language.
• Let’s get linking seriously. With a great number of links towards our sites, we can make it to the first page of search engines, and be found by newcomers. The status of our link buttons could greatly be improved.
• Let’s get organized. We have started the development of Animador, a PHP application that will help us do what SpreadFirefox does, and more. Among our wish-list are:
  • Better tracking of link button usage, allowing the creation of referrer accounts;
  • Better tracking of visits on our websites, with public reports so everyone can track progress;
  • A variety of tools to build a vibrant multi-lingual community for on-line marketing.

If this wakes a programmer’s, translator’s, or advocate’s itch in you, you’re warmly encouraged to participate.

1. The long-time GNU/Linux enthusiasts coming from Lxer or Digg are always welcome, of course, but our intended audience is made of Windows users just curious enough to type “linux” in search engines [↩]