Blog Posts About: help

Dear Common Craft reader, I want to know your thoughts. Just recently, I added del.icio.us bookmarks to this blog's RSS feed. If you're an RSS subscriber, you've seen the once-daily digest of my recent bookmarks (which also appear on our zeitgeist page).

Presumably, you subscribed (or visit occasionally) expecting some consistency in the form of community-related content. While the blog posts will continue to be (mostly) on-topic, I'm considering loosening the restrains on my bookmarking and perhaps veering wildly off-topic.

An example is this map of Europe from Moscow. I love stuff like this, but I have been stopping myself from bookmarking it because it's off-topic and a part of blog's RSS feed.

What do you think about veering off-topic? If I mixed in some bookmarks that were unrelated-but-interesting (to me at least), would you forgive me?

As we had hoped, the RSS in Plain English video has been a learning experience. One important lesson has been a better recognition of the needs of non-English speakers and the hearing impaired when it comes to video.

We want the video to be useful for everyone. Thankfully, (sorry I can't remember who) Darran pointed me to the Rocketboom episode where they reveal how they are using a service called DotSub to add user-generated subtitles in multiple languages to their videos. How cool.

So, I had to give it a try. I've loaded the RSS Video to DotSub and transcribed each line. Now that it is transcribed, any friendly bilingual person with the time (and DotSub membership) can create subtitles in their native language and share the video on their web site.

Updated: Here is the subtitled from DotSub, you can click the up/down arrow buttons in the footer of the player to change languages.

If you would like to translate subtitles for the RSS Video, sign up at DotSub and then go here.

Check out the subtitled version of the video with English subtitles.

The transcription process is slick and I'll use it again, but DotSub has some issues. The embedded player is too big and the interface is a bit confusing - "My Films" doesn't include films you've uploaded by default.

Updated: It's been great to see DotSub react to feedback. The first player I tried was too big for my blog. Since then, I have been in contact with Michael Smolen, the founder of DotSub and he said that others reported the same problem and today they rolled out an option for a smaller player.