novembre 2008

Oui, vous avez bien lu, demain j'achèterai le journal Libération (et c'est franchement pas le genre de magazine que j'achète d'habitude) voilà pourquoi :

Fin octobre, un bouquetin intrépide a débarqué sur des milliers d’écrans. Il s’agit de la version 8.10 de la distribution Linux Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex en VO. Hein ? Mais pourquoi donc Libération se met-il à parler de ce genre de trucs obscurs qui ne concernent qu’une poignée d’informaticiens barbus ? Sans doute parce que cette idée reçue n’a plus de raison d’être. Linux, qui est un système d’exploitation au même titre que Windows de Microsoft et OS X d’Apple, se tourne vers le grand public et devient petit à petit très accessible. Récit d’une transition pas si compliquée.

La suite demain, une pleine page dans Libération (1€30).

Demain dans Libération : le journal d’un novice en version papier

Ce week end, plein de mozilliens seront présents à l'Ubuntu party de Paris organisée à la cité des sciences de la Villette.

Nous auront notre propre salle d'activités, il y aura des ateliers, Delphine a promis de nous préparer des gâteaux et on fera des démos de plein de trucs marrants faits avec Mozilla.

C'est gratuit, c'est marrant, vous rencontrerez aussi des gens de l'April (une bonne occasion pour adhérer à l'assoce et aider le libre) et vous verrez les gens qui font Firefox dans la vraie vie, allez un échantillon de contributeurs Mozilla ci-dessous ! :

(photo prise au Mozilla Camp Barcelone)

Last week I met with Gregorio Robles, teacher from the university Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid and we have decided to see how his department (which is focused on FLOSS researches) and Mozilla could collaborate, even informally.

Gregorio has students studying the Free Software ecosystem, we have cool and fun products, mixing them sounded like a great idea. So we are organizing a MAOW (Mozilla Add-ons Workshop) in Madrid mid December: Details of MAOW

This will be the second MAOW this year after the one we organized in Paris last September (and we do plan to organize more MAOWs in Europe in 2009 now that Paul has joined the team!).

I am very happy to be able to organize this event with Gregorio and his team. BTW, he and his university come every year at FOSDEM and hang in the Research room, i am sure they will find some time to pop in the Mozilla room and talk a few minutes about how their students reacted to the MAOW.

As you may have learned recently on Seth's blog, we have been working lately on creating translated landing pages on mozilla.com for all of the locales that are not already supported on an official regional portal (that is those not on Mozilla Europe/China/Japan).

Now that I have a bit of time I can blog a bit about how this project is going.

We have created this week landing pages on mozilla.com for 7 of our locales (Afrikaans, Frisian, Irish, Indonesian, Georgian, Slovene, Swedish) which is a good start given that we (Laura and me) plan to have all of the 37 locales we are targeting done by the end of the year. By the way, the list of targeted locales is on the Web Dashboard, if your language is on the list of languages we are targeting, don't hesitate to come and help with the translation!

So what does it change for let's say a Slovene user compared to the previous situation? Until one week ago, a user with Internet Explorer in Slovene going to getfirefox.com or mozilla.com was redirected to mozilla.com/en-US/ and was offered a link to download Firefox in Slovene but the page was all written in English. This is good enough for people speaking English as a second language, but our target audience is no longer the computer and English savvy advanced users. We were certainly losing potential users for one of these reasons:

• The user gets to an English page and concludes that Firefox is not localized into his language.
• The user just doesn't understand what the page is about and leaves.
• We misdetect the visitor's locale and he downloads Firefox in the wrong language.

It is very clear to me that translating a whole portal like mozilla.com and keeping it up to date is not scalable. Maintaining a reduced version of a portal like we do on Mozilla Europe for 22 languages is already a very big task and could be seen as an ideal solution, but many of the locales we are speaking about have little human resources to keep and, more importantly, maintain an entire web site.

Another drawback of a multilingual portal is that any technical change in the reference language (English) may have an impact on localized pages. This is particularily true for stylesheet changes, I have already seen minor visual fixes on an English page impacting negatively the same page for other languages. So as to avoid that, updates on the English version have to be very carefully done and planned and lots of QA of localized pages has to be done when some files are updated in English. Definitely, this is not scalable or would be possible for a handful of languages only.

The solution chosen is one single landing page to propose the download of Firefox, give a few informations (among which a link to the locale's community portal) and also a link to Thunderbird pages in English. We have a separate stylesheet for that and we only share a cut-down version of the mozilla.com template. Our Hebrew localizer is also working on a Right-To-Left stylesheet, thanks Tomer for that!

Additionally, offering the right locale in a page written into the right language is not the only good news about it. This is also going to help promoting localized versions of Firefox more easily with a short url such as www.mozilla.com/af for Afrikaans. Great for printed material, banners or simply to give the url of the site verbally to a friend. This will also allow us to do real Search Engine Optimization in the user's language (as we did in the past on mozilla-europe.org) and one of the next things to do will be to evaluate the wording of this page for better result, I'll open bugs about it and we will work with our communities on optimizing the language for better search results. By the way, these pages are in Google results since this morning, which is a good start :)

One other good news is that we promote on this page community portals, which means that this will give more visibility to these portals and hopefully new contributors will join the Mozilla project.

Here is the list of current languages done (in the visitor's language so as to give it a small SEO boost ;) ):

• Firefox in Swedish / Firefox på svenska
• Firefox in Indonesian / Dapatkan Firefox Bahasa Indonesia
• Firefox in Irish / Firefox as Gaeilge
• Firefox in Georgian / Firefox ბრაუზერი ქართულად
• Firefox in Slovene / Firefox v slovenščini
• Firefox in Frisian / Firefox yn it Frysk
• Firefox in Afrikaans / Firefox in Afrikaans

UPDATE:

One more locale done today, Galician:

• Firefox in Galician / Firefox en Galego

• Une nouvelle qui m'avait échappé il y a 10 jours: Thunderbird et OBM remplacent Outlook et Exchange au ministère de l'Intérieur. Ils ont personnalisé Thunderbird avec l'inclusion de Lightning et renommé cette solution Pablo.
• il y a un nouveau portail de marketing communautaire pour Thunderbird SpreadThunderbird, ils ont notamment des boutons promotionnels assez jolis :)
• il y a aussi un planet: Planet Mozilla Messaging

Si vous lisez mon blog, il y a de grandes chances pour que vous soyez favorable au logiciels libres. Savez-vous qu'il existe une association travaillant au niveau national et maintenant aussi à Bruxelles chargée de défendre les logiciels libres en particuliers dans notre cadre législatif?

Cette association c'est l'April, j'en suis membre depuis un an et l'April lance une campagne d'adhésion pour passer de 2500 à 5000 membres d'ici la fin de l'année.

La cotisation est minime (il me semble que le minimum c'est 10€) et ils sont très utiles au logiciel libre en France, je vous encourage donc à les aider en devenant membre, les cotisations servent entre autres choses à payer des permanents super actifs.

DEVENIR MEMBRE DE L'APRIL

Si vous voulez promouvoir l'april, vous pouvez aussi installer une de leurs bannières sur votre site web (comme dans la barre latérale de mon blog). Si vous voulez avoir une rotation des différentes bannières disponible, voilà une petite fonction PHP pour ça:

function pubApril($nom) {
  $nom = str_replace(' ', '+', $nom);
  $url = array(
    'http://www.april.org/files/association/documents/bannieres/banniereadm.php?name='.$nom,
    'http://www.april.org/files/association/documents/bannieres/banniereadm2.php?name='.$nom,
    'http://www.april.org/files/association/documents/bannieres/banniereadm3.php?name='.$nom,
    'http://www.april.org/files/association/documents/bannieres/banniereadm4.php',
    'http://www.april.org/files/association/documents/bannieres/banniereadm5.php',
    'http://www.april.org/files/association/documents/bannieres/banniereadm6.php',
  );

  echo '<p id="pubApril"><a href="http://www.april.org/adherer"><img src="'.$url[array_rand($url, 1)].'" alt="Promouvoir et soutenir le logiciel libre"/></a></p>';
}

pubApril('Pascal Chevrel');