The journal in four languages, online when it is published
Every post now reads in English, German, French and Italian, and a published post is on elchi.dev at once instead of with the next build of the site.
The journal has two changes a reader notices. Every post exists in English, German, French and Italian. And a post is online the moment it is published, not with the next build of the site.
Why four languages
When we started the journal on 3 October, it was English only. The reasoning was that EAuth, the developer documentation and most people building on it work in English. That still holds for developers. It does not hold for the people who decide to hand us their website, their sign-in or their mail: a Treuhand office in Zug, a municipality, a practice in Lugano. They read German, French or Italian first, and a technical post in their own language is one reason fewer to ask somebody else what it means.
Each post now has its own address in each language, under /de/journal, /en/journal, /fr/journal and /it/journal. The English text stays the original. Sources, the date and the author belong to the post, so they are the same in every language. A post without a translation yet is listed in English on the other indexes, marked as such.
Why it is online at once
The first version of the journal was part of the static site. Publishing a post stored it, and it appeared when the site was built and deployed again. We wrote in why we write a journal that the cost was a step between publishing and being online, and the gain was that every page was built and checked as a whole.
That step turned out to cost more than it saved: a correction waited for a deploy, and so did every new post. So the journal moved into the backend, which already renders the legal texts and the documentation. The checks did not move away: a post or a translation with an em dash, a missing title or a broken source is refused when it is saved, exactly as before.
What else changed
- Search engines that support IndexNow hear of a new or changed post when it is saved.
- Every language version has its own Markdown twin at the post's address plus
.md, and its own Atom feed. - The sitemap names every language version with its alternates, so a search engine shows the German post to a German reader.
- Every server hears of a change within a few seconds, so a correction is everywhere almost at once.
The post that explains the old way stays as it was, with a note that points here.
Sources
- IndexNow documentation, IndexNow, read
- Tell Google about localized versions of your page, Google Search Central, read
Written by Samuel Krauss, Founder. Filed under company, journal.