Web42Log - a log, only a log

Web42Log, that's short for Web Utility For Creating A Multilingual News Log, is an effort to create a tool which tries to help you maintaining a web log in more than one language.

Without going into detail one could say a web log is a site where you can publish news in form of articles and maybe images. The news entries are appearing on the homepage with date, headlines and the beginning of the body (or, for short articles, the whole body) and when you click on them you get a page with the whole article, comments to it and the ability to post your own comments.

One of the most famous web logs is Slashdot. Other examples are kuro5hin, Root Prompt and Advogato, just to name a few of thousands. Then there are uncountable private logs; some as detailed diaries telling the visitor every minute of the publishers life, others sporadically updated with news or thoughts or links or else...

To get into it you can just browse through the Eatonweb Portal or search many logs for keywords using the Daypop search engine. Most private logs are linking to other logs and so on. If you are exploring these jewels of the web for the first time you shouldn't be in a hurry - the journey could take some time...

There are many logs out there with menus in many different languages. What sticks to one language only is the content. There are many people speaking more than one language, there are so called multilingual logs where some entries are in one language and some in the other, but there are almost no private logs with news entries available in all languages.

Of course the lack of flexible software is only one reason for the lack of true multilingual web logs. The other reason is the time that one have to take for typing the content in multiple languages.

Web42Log tries to shorten this additional time by using Google for a pre-translation of your texts. While the results of this translation are funny in most cases you can use them very well as a template for quick correction. This procedure, integrated into the intuitive work flow of publishing articles, should save your worthy time.

English is not your native language and you want to publish news for your non inglese friends in your mother language as well as in english for international visitors
You are multilingual by nature because you live in an area where more than one language is theofficial language
You want to gain more experience in writing a second or third language
You want to attract women/men and impress your friends
You are a geek

A complete portal site in the spirit of PHP-Nuke, PHPWebSite and others. While these programs are trying do serve you everything they can only scratch the surface in some details. Web42Log does only one thing for you, and that to the full extent permitted by applicable law: It manages your multilingual web log (I think I mentioned this already).
A diskussion board, a photo album, or anything else that doesn't happen to be a web log. It may be possible to use Web42Log for purposes other than web logging and I would be glad to hear about it, but that is not my primary goal.

This does not mean that you can't have anything else on your web site. You are free to use other software, e.g. a photo album, and include links to it in your Web42Log home page.

For now there are only some documents and no code. While the whole thing is under construction you can watch The Making Of to see it growing!