Tag: decisions

About this blog (4): English or Dutch

This is the fourth post in the ‘about this blog’ series and is a follow up of the previous one about decisions. It’s about the decisions whether to write in English or Dutch.

As you may have noticed, the main language on this website is Dutch, while I’m writing this blog in English. Why not stick to one language for everything? Or translate the site as a whole?

First of all, I’m Dutch, so my native language is Dutch. Because of this writing in Dutch is more easily for me than writing in English. There are a few reasons why I chose to write this blog in English:

  • To improve my English writing skills. I’m using English a lot for communicating with others. When I’m writing an email, sometimes I can’t find the words to express myself. By writing in English on this blog, I hope it’ll be more easily for me to express myself and not to make stupid mistakes we Dutch sometimes make.
  • I hope sometimes I have something to write about that’s interesting for a broader audience than only the Dutch-speaking.

The main reason why only the blog is written in English is that most of my customers are Dutch and I didn’t have time to translate everything. Maybe someday I’ll have a complete bilingual website.

I won’t say I’ll never write in Dutch on this blog, because I can imagine that sometimes I want to write about something that’s only interesting for Dutch speaking. But I’ll have to find out what the best way will be to do this.

About this blog (3): Decisions

This is the third post in the ‘about this blog’ series: Decisions.

Before starting this blog I had to make a few decisions. Some of them were easy to make, others were not so easy to make.

The first decision was which blogging sofware to use. I already wrote about this one in the first post of this series: About this blog (1): Custom Made

During the development of the blogging software I ran into a rather difficult decision: what kind of URL schema am I going to use? There’s been written a lot about this subject, so I started reading.

One of the most important things about URL design is to keep URLs simple and human readable. If these two are true for your URLs a search engine won’t have problems crawling your blog.

I started looking at other blogs and noticed there are many different ways to design an url. Here are a few (random) examples:

/blog/2007/02/16/Recreational-SVG

/yyyy/mm/dd/Title-without-Spaces

/2007/03/web-20-borrel-een-succes-open-coffee-meet-coming-up/

/yyyy/mm/title-without-spaces

/amigo/customer-service-tips

/tagname/titile-with-spaces

/svn/posts/302-preview-5-highrise-tasks

/id-of-post-plus-title-without-spaces

Because I’m using Ruby on Rails the last example would be the easiest to build. But I like /yyyy/mm/title-without-spaces better.

Does it really matter which one you choose? I don’t think so. All of the above URLs are SEO friendly. Some people argue you should not add dates to your URLs, while others think it’s good for your permalink structure to do so.

I decided to use dates in my weblog URLs although it’s slightly more complex to implement with my Restful weblog controller. I did it because I like the resulting structure of URLs which can be used as an archive: ”/weblog/2007/” gives all posts from 2007, ”/weblog/2007/01/” gives all posts from january 2007, etc. I left the day out of the URL, because I don’t think it’s very useful (I’m not planning on writing tens of posts every day).

Next decision was more easy to decide: Use full or partial text feeds. It was more easy, because I personally like reading blogs which use full text feeds, so I’m using a full text feed.

The final decision was a difficult one: which language to use, english or dutch. This will be the subject of the next post in this series.