July 2009 Archives

I am currently designing a website for a company and use the CMS TypoLight. A really nice tool, I like it. It produces clean code and you can easily do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is by the way still an important aspect in development of websites.

But I have one little problem: The website should handle multiple languages. This is generally possible with TypoLight, as you can have multiple site roots in one installation and discriminate the user according to language settings from his browser. This gives you the right entry point, but not search engine optimised.

There are different ways around to do the language switch and so on. You find them if you browse the extension directory for the tag "language". However this is only considering the switch from one language to another, at least in most cases. But what I want is a way to show on one hand the user, which languages he is using in the URL and on the other hand to the search engine, that it will index all my pages.

The package "Glossaries" (the package is found here) is a nice one. You can easily make multiple glossaries and you can also use it to manage your acronyms and abbreviations. Some really nice features, like that the acronym is written on the first appearing out and given in brackets the abbreviation and subsequently appears only abbreviated, have convinced me to use this package. It is also already installed by default in the MacTex-Distribution

Well the only problem ist, that you need some patience to try out the different configurations when you use it the first time. So I have looked around and found some help on the blog of MedienPeter.
By the way: If you are looking for templates or tutorials for a thesis or something like this, I recently stumbled upon an entry on the blog of Philippe Niquille.

But now back to the configuration options and the packages you need to use "Glossaries" in your LaTeX-Document.

As soon as you have a nice front end of your website, which should be functional (and compliant with current regulations), you will have to provide a contact form or a email-address somewhere. I have decided to show only my email-address, but wanted to protect it at least with a minimal encryption from mail-harvesters.

In an earlier version of my page I have used the template engine Smarty, which has some functions to encrypt your email-address with JavaScript. And I have to say that this worked fine for me so far. So my current page uses Zend Framework and I am not the great JavaScript-Coder. This is why I decided to try to merge this two codes together. And it works. Here comes how.

First you need to download Smarty.
You need a running Zend Framework Site.
And an editor.