Tools and hacks: Wikipedia redirect
I’m not a great programmer, but sometimes I come up with little neat tools that might be useful to others. I am going to try to post more of them on this blog, and I also made a page called Tools and hacks, where I will be collecting them.
Here is the first one:
Wikipedia language redirect
Example: http://reganmian.net/redir/en/zh/Hamar (takes you to the article on Hamar (哈马尔) in Chinese Wikipedia.
Explanation: redir/from-language/to-language/article.
Example 2: http://reganmian.net/redir/it/ar/Democrazia (looks up democracy (ديمقراطي) in Arabic Wikipedia)
Rationale: Supposed to be used through for example a Firefox shortcut (http://reganmian.net/redir/en/zh/%s) for your most common combination. I use it frequently for Chinese, when my friend tells me he just made a great page about Moscow, or to find out how they spell Plato.
Stian
(Thanks to pvera @ flickr for the photo)
August 30th, 2007 @ 11:56 am
Actually what happened was that my registration expired, and the domain host (uhsdomains.com) sent me an email saying I needed to renew, giving me a URL. However that URL was consistently down during the week in which I tried it repeatedly, and when contacting them by email I received no answer. When I finally managed to get a hold of them, several weeks later, my domain had lapsed and been replaced by an ad site, and it would cost me 150$ to buy it back. They would also not release it and let me transfer it to someone else.
Either way, it's not as bad as it could have been, since I had not been updating my blog for about half a year before this happened, so I had lost most of the visitors anyway – being in Indonesia. Now I registered the domain with my webhost, site5.com, whose customer service I've been very happy with so far.