Poenta

Welcome to our humble abode!

Howdy y'all, this is Arian.

I'm excited to announce the first incarnation of our small Web design studio's blog. Although Poenta was founded a while back, we never really embraced the blogging habit on behalf of the studio. Reasons vary a lot, however, starting today we're a bit more serious about having our own voice within the giant Web community of talented creatives.

Being frank to our selves and accepting the challenge however big it is, we're fully aware that it's gonna take blood, sweat and a shitload of work to maintain a decent publishing schedule and provide inspiring, attractive and innovative articles about the two key topics that we'll be focused writing on; Code & Pixels.

A developer that I happen to be, I'll be mostly covering Web Development related articles, with an emphasis on developing with Chyrp, the ultra-awesome blogging engine. Other topics may include (but not limited to) PHP5, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Git, the Cloud etc.

Graphic & Web Design stuff will generally be covered by Driton. He's eager about providing Freebies rather than tutorials, but this will all be under his authorship whenever he has the mood of doing one. His readiness knows to oscillate quite often to be honest, so I'll make sure to find the right moment and encourage him in doing and make things happen.

We're strict about harnessing the full potential of every possible social site we can. All design shots will be uploaded on Dribbble, code snippets on Gist and we'll be hanging a lot on Twitter, so make sure to follow us on any of these if you don't wanna miss.

On a side note, constant minor changes in the overall blog's design are imminent. We're open to suggestions and criticism on this regard, hence, please feel free to drop us a note by email or leave a comment on this post. As it's clearly indicated we have comments enabled on this blog! Just keep the crap to yourself, please!

Here's to a brighter future and let's play along. May God help us all!

Chyrp Drop-down Archive List

Since I have a fixed positioned sidebar in this site, the archive list was growing and gradually not completely visible on smaller screens, I had to find a workaround and still keep it consistent on this site.

So I modified the theme and still display the archives where they are right now, and I came up with a simple drop-down option. Here's how you can do it too.

Using Chyrp's Aggregate Module

Chyrp's Aggregate Module is über-awesome! Here's how easily you could pull say your Twitter Feed in Chyrp.

Navigate to Extend and Enable Aggregator Module, go to Manage > Aggregates, click Add Aggregate. Fields should be filled accordingly, here's a preview of my Twitter Feed.

Let me explain what each field is about.

• Name - name of your feed for you to distinguish.
• Source URL - the ATOM or RSS URL of the feed to fetch.
• Feather - type of post to create.
• Author - you know, normally it's you.
• Post Attributes - there's only so much things you can do here and it's relevant to the chosen Feather. In this case, the Quote Feather has two attributes; source and quote. My Twitter username is on the first, and the content of my tweet as the quote itself. Note the call:substr(feed[title] || 13) is the parts I want to trim, because the feed[title] returns the tweet together with the username. So you can cut that part out. Number 13 is the length of the username, and it should have been 14 in order to hide the ':' but it is so for the sake of the argument.

Once that is filled in, hit Add Aggregate and new posts of type Quote should be created having your tweets as content.

The feed settings would normally be set in config.yaml.php like so:

aggregates: 
  Twitter: 
    url: "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/18228003.rss"
    last_updated: 1323557875
    feather: "quote"
    author: 1
    data: 
      source: "[arianxhezairi](http://twitter.com/#!/arianxhezairi)"
      quote: "call:substr(feed[title] || 13)"

That should normally do the work. Happy aggregating! Let me know @poenta if you can't work it out, I'm always glad to help.

Translating Chyrp

One of many neat Chyrp features is internationalization (i18n). English is the default language of this awesome blogging tool, but it can be translated to any language, if there's a translation file to be found.

Many Chyrp users recently hopped in, volunteering to translate Chyrp into their own native language, which I think it's excellent and very valuable help. Nevertheless, some asked which is the decent translating procedure, although there is none really. On behalf of that, I will briefly show the one required tool for translating .po files, compiling them to .mo format, and how easily it is to teach Chyrp speak another language.

All you need is Poedit

Poedit is cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor. It is built with wxWidgets toolkit and can run on any platform supported by it (although it was only tested on Unix with GTK+ and Windows). It aims to provide more convenient approach to editing catalogs than launching vi and editing the file by hand.

As you can see, Poedit can't be any simple than that, one window app and self-explanatory. There is one single rule to obey however, don't change the original strings. They serve as IDs by which Chyrp figures out which line to replace with the translated string, so keep that in mind. Depending on your Poedit preferences, every time you save the changes to the Chyrp .po file, there is an extra .mo file created, and that is what Chyrp uses to speak your language. Everything else is plain easy.

Beginning and completing the translation

Chyrp comes with .pot catalog files. You're going to have to harness Poedit to turn those into .po files. Fire up Poedit and go to File > New catalog from POT file, select one of the files you want to start with.

In the next dialog window fill in the fields with your information as the author of the file being translated. After that, jump from one line to another and complete the translation fields with the relevant meaning.

One last thing though, remember to maintain the proper directory structure of the translated files. It is also a good practice to include both .po and .mo files in case there's a mistakenly translated line and someone spots it and wants to help out to further improve it.

Below is the directory structure of my Albanian translation of Chyrp.

feathers
  audio - locale - sq_Al.mo
  chat  - locale - sq_AL.mo
  link  - locale - sq_Al.mo
  photo - locale - sq_AL.mo
  quote - locale - sq_AL.mo
  text  - locale - sq_AL.mo
  video - locale - sq_AL.mo
includes 
  locale
    sq_AL.mo
modules
  aggregator  - locale - sq_AL.mo
  cacher      - locale - sq_AL.mo
  comments    - locale - sq_AL.mo
  markdown    - locale - sq_AL.mo
  paging      - locale - sq_AL.mo
  read_more   - locale - sq_AL.mo
  smartypants - locale - sq_AL.mo
  swfupload   - locale - sq_AL.mo
  tags        - locale - sq_AL.mo
  textilize   - locale - sq_AL.mo
themes
  stardust
    locale
      sq_AL.mo

Finally, compress the structure to .zip (more common than .rar) and upload it under Chyrp.net | Extend > Translations page, in order for your fellow natives to download it and enjoy Chyrp in your own language.