Adso WordPress Plugin
Feb 9th, 2008 by admin
I’ve been working on a plugin that integrates Adso with WordPress, so that anyone can offer on-click annotation of Chinese text. All about getting past translating and getting to discussing content.
I’m working on the plugin in the office right now, and it is frigid. Much warmer today than it’s been for the last week, I’ve still got the heater sitting beside me cranked to the max. Still, I’m pleased with the progress. You can try out the plugin by clicking anywhere on the text below:
新华网北京２月１０日电（记者孙玉波）住房问题，作为民生热点问题备受全社会关注。２００８年，建设部提出，落实党的十七大提出的“住有所居”的目标，切实关注中低收入家庭改善住房条件的需求，采取切实措施，抓出成效。
建设部副部长姜伟新近日提出，今年建设部要抓紧做好三项工作。
一是要抓紧完善住房保障体系。当前的首要任务，是全面落实国务院关于解决城镇低收 入家庭住房困难的各项工作部署，建立健全廉租住房制度，加强经济适用住房的建设和管理。尽快落实工作机构，完善工作机制。各地要确保廉租住房和经济适用住 房的资金投入和土地供应，确保实现关于低保家庭“应保尽保”的目标
Should take a day or two to iron out the bugs. Expecting to make a public release within a week. [UPDATE: November 14th — the plugin is now public. You can read about the full release, or download the plugin directly].
This is looking very nifty. Couple of suggestions:
When you click for annotation, there’s no indication that anything is actually happening bar the ‘connecting to adsotrans’ note in the status bar, which some browsers won’t even display. You might want some indicator - one of those ‘loading’ gifs that appeared along with AJAX applications - to let people know that it’s doing something.
Also, I think it would be worth having something in the css to indicate where the scope of annotation starts and ends. In the example above I’d assumed it would be one call to annotate them all, but it actually worked on a paragraph basis. And as you’ve already got the highlighting on non-annotated content, perhaps a pop-up ‘click to annotate’ box for users who don’t yet know what the highlighting indicates.
definitely need to implement some sort of user-notification. A friend from Australia made the same comment (she thought the lag in annotation was something to do with her own computer’s problems rather than the trans-Pacific lag).
Need to fix that as well as a cryptic error message that keeps popping up under IE that is ridiculously hard to debug. Microsoft isn’t exactly courting developers by making it near-impossible to find out where problems lie.
This new-to-adsotrans visitor via Sinosplice is floored. Splitting the atom pales by comparison. Very cool stuff. Since I’m now undergoing a very painful (for me) port over to Wordpress and will finally have a workable blogging system, I’m doubly excited about the chance to integrate this when it’s ready. I don’t claim to perceive the whims of the gods, but surely the riches of ten thousand heavens await this good deed.
Did you edit this post or something? Characters displayed just fine when I checked it out in Safari on a Mac a couple of hours ago; as of 2:56 AM in Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows XP, every other character is getting replaced with three question marks, and clicking yields a massive Javascript popup filled with Unicode hex.
(Huh. Now it’s back to normal, but the middle paragraph isn’t displaying right, and clicking still pops up a modal dialog box filled with gibberish.) (Huh. Another reload and it works fine. Maybe just a delay in loading the Javascript?)
A third huh: what had been happening elsewhere on this blog was that mousing over a block of text highlighted it but didn’t bring up a popup; a subsequent click brought up the Javascript dialog, and then dismissing the dialog and mousing over the text again made it work. This had to be done for each discrete chunk of text — if two sections of Chinese were separated by a line break or English, I would have to 点 two 次 (as this comment should hopefully demonstrate). Known issue?
@Brendan — Dude! Under development means under development! I want every little snippet of Chinese to have to be adsotated separately. Otherwise the response time will slow down as the server annotates chunks of English. Have just been struggling to get PHP (which doesn’t support UTF8 but needs to wrap the Chinese text in a span tag) and IE (the javascript implementation of which is truly awful) to work with non-ASCII text. I could kiss the Mozilla developers at this point, but won’t.
@syz - thanks for the compliment. Looking forward to seeing it get some use and will ping you when it’s done.
Ok, the plugin seems to be working on both IE and Firefox for me now. Internet Explorer doesn’t support live-resegmentation or the yellow onmouseover, but it’s a miracle the thing works at all on that browser.
If the Yahoo deal promises to give Microsoft someone (anyone) who knows something (anything) about non-ASCII encodings, I’m a full backer at this point.
when do we get to get our hands on this? This is… syz took the words out of my mouth! I hope to implement it as soon as it’s done.
@Joel - thanks. Should be available within a week. Will send you a ping by email when it’s ready.
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Nice! Thanks!
Very Nice! Thanks!
I hit a problem. I’ve been using John’s script where I manually add mouseover tooltips for each instance of hanzi with a span tag (and almost all my hanzi use this span tag). When I installed the Adso plugin, it worked, but conflicted with the span tag and made a bit of a mess. Here’s a screenshot.
I’d love to use the plugin, but right now it would make too big a mess of my previously posted hanzi. 怎么办？
wooo, man, you work fast!
Thanks tons.
No problem. Don’t really work fast so much as slow. Solved the problem two days ago working with Mark from toshuo.com. Just forgot to update the package for download.
Updated now, so hopefully others won’t have the same problem. Let me know if you run into more problems.