Site News

[Stewart]

The forum software was upgraded today to the latest release, and this release brings many new things to the software in addition to irons out bugs and the like from previous incarnations.

I won't bore you with all the spam management modifications and some I won't be switching on because they don't suit a community like this, but there are a couple of interesting new widgety inclusions that may spark interest.

The first is thread tagging. When creating a thread members can now list a few descrptive terms for it. For example, a thread on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina may be tagged with phrases like tolstoy, tragedy, russian, 19th century, realist, aristocracy. Members who did not start the thread may also contribute up to five tags to the thread. There is, however, a limit of 25 tags per thread. The benefit of this is that by clicking on any of these tags you will be given a list of all threads similarly tagged. So clicking on russian will bring up a list of all threads members have thought to label as being Russian. Alternatively, to search by tags, you can also go to the Search dropdown menu and select Tag Search. The tag cloud there will only show the top seventy tags, but there will be plenty more to search for. You can see the tag cloud here.

The second is member profiles. These have been given an overhaul to give them more of a social networking theme. Therefore, aside from some basic information about the member, they allow other members to post comments to them, to show friends from the forum, and to display recent visitors to profiles.

Also, since I haven't mentioned them before, I suppose now is the time. In the main edit box when writing posts, you may have noticed the following three icons:

Let's walk through these one at a time:

Spoilers.

If, in discussing a book, you may be about to give crucial plot details away that other readers may be unaware of, it's probably best to use a spoiler. By hitting this button ()you will be giving a couple of tags, looking like this: [SPOILER][/SPOILER]. Put your spoiler between these (like so: [SPOILER]The butler did it.[/SPOILER] and your text will show up blocked out. Users will need to move the mouse over the text to reveal the spoiler. (i.e. The butler did it. ).

Google

Want to link to a search on Google? Then just hit this button () and you will be given a couple of tags, looking like this: [GOOGLE][/GOOGLE]. Put your search term between these (like so: [GOOGLE]world literature forum[/GOOGLE] and your text will show up with a link to Google. (i.e. world literature forum)

Wikipedia

Want to link to an article on Wikipedia? Then just hit this button () and you will be given a couple of tags, looking like this: [WIKI][/WIKI]. Put your article term between these (like so: [WIKI]world literature[/WIKI] and your text will show up with a link to Wikipedia. (i.e. world literature

[Stewart]

I've added another new button, which is

This allows you to post a link to all threads tagged with a specific word or phrase without having to worry about getting the whole URL. So, clicking the button will give you [TAG][/TAG] and by putting the word or phrase between these tags, like [TAG]japanese[/TAG], will return a link like this: japanese, which, when clicked, lists the threads tagged accordingly.

[Stewart]

Some new 'smilies' added to the posting interface. If you want to rate books when posting throughts or reviews then I've added five star ratings.

To post these you can click on the relevant icon in the smilies box or you can type it out where asterisks represent stars and 0 represents non-stars. So, for example, to give something three stars, you would type ***00.

[Stewart]

More updates.

This time, as you may have noticed, I've uploaded plenty of national flags to the site. Currently, since there's almost two hundred of them, I'm not going to make them publicly available until I can work out a way to make selecting one less cumbersome. So I will update threads with a relevant flag as new threads appear.

I've also added a couple more icons that anyone can use when creating threads to give an indication of content. These are:

• - Awards/Prizes
• - Sites of Interest

[Beth]

The flags are a great idea. It's embarrassing to have such a lack of familiarity with world flags as I do; seeing them associated with authors can only help in learning them.

[Stewart]

Another addition. I've added a couple of custom fields to everyone's profile. You can edit them from your user profile.

These are:

• Current Read (Title)
• Current Read (Author)

They should be self explanatory and, once the title and author of your current read is entered, it will appear formatted underneath your post count.

Once I get/create some decent icons, I'll add some further options for you to list/link some of your social networking IDs, should you have any, such as LibraryThing and GoodReads.

[Stewart]

A new section has been added to the forum today: The Blogosphere. This is an area that provides a selection of links from around the blogosphere where bloggers are discussing translated/world literature, whether it be reviews, festival news, reflections, obituaries, etc. - and all managed by a bot called BlogSpy. (Incidentally, if anyone can think of a better name, I'm listening.)

In a way it's a tentative experiment to see if it can help with World Literature Forum's visibility on search engines as, while there are threads on specific authors and books, there is so much more out there that can be brought in to the site. And hopefully it will help the bloggers, too, by driving some traffic their way and helping raise the profile of their blog.

I've added a number of blogs for now and will continue to scour the net looking for more blogs where people are posting information relevant to the forum's subject matter. I'll get round to creating a Sticky post in The Blogosphere listing all blogs currently aggregated and, if anyone has suggestions for more, then just send me a private message with the details.

[Patrick Murtha]

Stewart, I added a signature to flag my own blog:

Patrick Murtha's Diary

But I can't see it with my posts. Did I do something wrong?

EDIT: I do see it with this post, so maybe it only gets added to your future posts, and not retroactively to all your posts, as happens at some forums.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Patrick Murtha

EDIT: I do see it with this post, so maybe it only gets added to your future posts, and not retroactively to all your posts, as happens at some forums.

Yes, it doesn't look as if it gets done retroactively. I've had a tinker around the back with an Update Signatures option, but it doesn't seem to have had the desired effect. Or any effect, for that matter.

[Stewart]

You've probably noticed already that I've made a little structural change. Since the forum's name is World Literature Forum, I can't get away from the fact that some world literature (from India, Nigeria, etc.) is written in English. So I've removed the English Literature forum and integrated all the threads therein to the relevant continent. And I've changed all mentions of translated literature to world literature. There's a place for all here.

[Eric]

The creation of categories is in interesting pursuit. If people switch off at the very mention of the buzz-word "translation", you have to trick stubborn translatophobes into reading translations by suppressing all mention of that dreaded word.

Also, you can provoke them by saying that they ought to stop reading all translations. This would put, for instance, all Christians in a quandary, as their whole religion is built on translations of translations in a series of translations compiled under the name "The Bible". You can do the same with the adepts of other religions.

Next, the translatophobes would have to eschew all those classics, such as Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Mann, and all the other authors whose fat novels they keep boasting about having read.

Using the term "world literature" avoids the use of the them-&-us term "foreign literature", and indeed broadens the whole way of viewing it. The only remaining problem is access to literature, because obviously we can all access literature written in English immediately, while books, even from neighbouring countries to Britain, can only be read if they have appeared in English translation (except for a minority of people who read the originals).

But as has been pointed out on another thread, even literature written in English suffers from hierarchical treatment. So everyone´s heard of U.S. and British literature, while Canadian, Australian, N.Z. and South African literature rather fall by the wayside. Irish, Scottish and Welsh literature adopt a somewhat middle position, in this respect, sometimes getting sucked into the canon, sometimes not. Or individual authors are creamed off.

[Stewart]

Not really anything major as far as site news goes, but I've made a MySpace profile for the forum, which helped pass a couple of hours.

[nnyhav]

In My Details, how about adding "Currently reading(translator)" to (title) & (author)? Credit where due and all ...

[Stewart]

Okay, I'll have a look into it.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by nnyhav

In My Details, how about adding "Currently reading(translator)" to (title) & (author)? Credit where due and all ...

This has now been added.

[Stewart]

Just for info: I've found out that I could turn off the Friends/Public Messaging system on members' profiles, which I've wanted to do from the start. So I've turned it off. The Social Groups feature remains though, as I can see uses in that.

[Stewart]

I've added a section for bookmarks to each thread, for Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google. If you use any of these social bookmarking sites and like a thread, please do bookmark it and tag it there so as to help extend World Literature Forum's reach and make as many entry points as possible.

Just click on the relevant icon to add it to your bookmarks on those sites.

[Colette Jones]

Originally Posted by Stewart

Not really anything major as far as site news goes, but I've made a MySpace profile for the forum, which helped pass a couple of hours.

Wow, I just had a look and there's a comment from the "Tattered Cover Bookstore". The name rang a bell and sure enough it's a book shop in Denver (I lived in Denver most of the '80s). In fact, there are now three shops!

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Colette Jones

Wow, I just had a look and there's a comment from the "Tattered Cover Bookstore". The name rang a bell and sure enough it's a book shop in Denver (I lived in Denver most of the '80s). In fact, there are now three shops!

That's cool. I went all out on MySpace for an evening, befriending all the profiles I could find of world lit authors, then got carried away and befriended publishers and some book stores.

[Stewart]

Another update to the forum. I've got in a bit of software, vBSEO that should hopefully help with search engines rankings for the site, as I bid to further spread its wings. Amongst many other things, it rewrites each page's URL, using keywords from the thread titles (hence why I like them so organised).